Quotes from Paula McLain

We met when he took Ben and me on safari. Blix always seduces the wives if he's given enough time. He likes them trembling with fear, I suppose…at the precipice of mortal danger." She raised a feathery eyebrow. "I don't think he counted on keeping me, but that was almost two years ago.

it's not what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it.

Those things are as real as anything else, though, and I'll have to fly through them. Straight through the sickening dips and air pockets, because you can't chart a course around anything you're afraid of. You can't run from any part of yourself, and it's better that you can't.

each person here because the time has come for this, for arriving and surrendering, for saying yes to the truth and just going there, to that place, where we already are.

I don't exactly know, but it feels important to go there. It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it. Everything's changing so fast. I want to believe in something while there's still time. I want to tell the truth, even when it's difficult. And I want to find the story I'm meant to write.

I love you, Tatie. You're what's best about me.

and yet just now, in my cold cot, I felt strangely close to him. It was his life I was reaching for in coming here, and if I couldn't have my father back, exactly, maybe not ever, I could have the rightness of looking in the same direction, of stepping into his shadow with my own. I didn't know a thing about marriage or men—that had been proven well enough. But I did know horses. For the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I should be.

That's the problem with going into the world, isn't it? You actually have to face things you find you don't want to know. In the same way that fish had quickness, cats had a way of being still. That was their gift, and you could learn a lot by watching them get there. If you lay close with them, and matched your breathing with theirs, you sometimes thought you had a great and very rare secret.

Only the day before, Cockie's dark joke wouldn't have included me, but now it did. "Is love always such a mess, do you suppose?

Firs and pines and Sitka spruce thicken around me, pushing in from all directions, black-tipped fairy-tale trees that knit shadows out of nothing, night out of day—as if they've stolen all the light and hidden it somewhere.

Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other.

This is why there is poetry. For days like these.

To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too—that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up. But

In exchange for Pegasus's stall and my own bunk, D gave me two horses to train. They were both past their prime, dull eyed and recalcitrant, but I was trying to prove myself. I would have to treat them like royalty. I laboured over their exercise and feeding schedules, filling notebooks, trying to meet them on their own territory, and to find or understand something untapped in them, something no one had yet seen. Dynasty,

Ben isn't hard to manage, but Blix's wife, Karen, likes the title too much to part with it. He's made her a baroness." She sighed. "The whole thing has got rather baroque. Karen and I are friends, or were, in any case. Blix asked her for a divorce and told her he was in love with me, probably thinking it would soften the blow." She shook her head. "Now she won't speak to me.

When I turned to leave the groom to his work, I saw that D's ranch manager had been watching us. His name was Boy Long, and he was exotic-looking for these parts, with jet-black hair and a single gold hoop in one ear. His particular flair made me think of a pirate. "What's in the tincture?" he wanted to know. "Nothing unusual." He looked me up and down. "I don't believe you, but you can keep your secret." A

would be two days traveling, at least, and then he'd be

He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy.

I had forged her myself, out of brokenness, learning to love wildness instead of fearing it. To thrive on the exhilaration of the hunt, charging headlong into the world even when it hurt to do it.

Though Kenya was vast, there was surprisingly little privacy in our colony. Everyone seemed to know everyone else's business, particularly when it was personal.

By her estimation, an affair was as de rigueur for the colonists as quinine tablets were for fever—a way to weather or temporarily forget marital unhappiness. But Boy wasn't really an affair, was he? What he offered was purer and more animal than what Cockie was embroiled in with Blix, or so I was telling myself. Besides, it felt wonderful. After

After a year of fumbling and embarrassing encounters with Jock, I was finally learning what sex was, and that I liked it. Boy would come into my cottage at night and wake me by roughly pressing against me, his hands everywhere before I was fully conscious.

And so it was that every few weeks, on a Saturday morning, I went home to Njoro to be a wife. D

we never survive them, or anyone we love. Not in the