Quotes from Paula McLain

Beautiful women would sing his name,

Outside, the storm picked up, dropping a soundless sheet of white.

I grew up with the Kips. For them, sex doesn't get all tangled up with guilt or expectations. It's something you do with your body, like hunting." "There are people who'd tell you we're exactly like the animals. Same appetites, same urges. It's a nice idea.

Cut everything superfluous,' Pound had said. 'Go in fear of abstractions. Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

When I pulled up in D's wagon, I nearly always got a chaste kiss on the cheek. We'd have a drink on the veranda and discuss what had happened on the farm while I was away, the servants milling around us, always happy to see me home. But as soon as night fell and we were alone, the mood turned chilly fast. Jock never tried to touch me sexually—that

Beginnings are important, too, darling. You should be patient with life.

Caleb is here in the cabin, sitting in the middle of my couch.

Arap Ruta indeed. I had known him since he wasn't

I had the pure sense that I couldn't ever truly lose the past, or forget what any of it had meant.

This war was only about greed, it seemed to me, and insanity. Adolf Hitler was a madman—everyone knew that—but he was also a child, a red-faced, angry baby bent on total dominion.

It's freedom you want, then." "Good God, yes. Don't you?" "I don't know. I want to be happy I suppose." "Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.

While we watched, he dragged over a chair and climbed on top of it to pound a small copper peg into the upper-right-hand corner of the door with the mallet, hammering away. "Every time my wife has an indiscretion I'm going to add a nail," he said to the door. I couldn't see his expression and couldn't bear to look at Cockie or Ben. "It might be the only way we'll be able to keep track.

most of us have very little choice about what we're going to become or who we're going to love, or what place on earth chooses us, becoming home. All we can do is go when we're called, and pray we'll still be taken in.

real business of what it meant to live in those time periods came alive for

When my exam results arrived several weeks later, I took the simple envelope off where I could be alone with it, my heart gunning, and broke the seal. Inside, instead of a dreadful notice telling me I'd failed, there was an official document, typed and signed. MRS. B. PURVES had been granted an English trainer's licence, good until 1925.

they failed at some important task and were banished to the heavens. The women themselves were wizened and toothless, or supple as polished ebony, with long-muscled limbs under pale shukas. I loved them and their tales, but I wanted more to join Kibii and the other totos who were becoming warriors, young morani. The role of girls in the village was entirely domestic. I had a different position—a rare one, free from the

We can only go to the limits of ourselves—I've learned that if nothing else. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone." "She may have to sell the

turned down all the lamps and padded to my room in the dark. Soundlessly, I packed my few things quickly and was on my way before midnight.

Jock had a pal from the King's African Rifles who came to stand up for him—the tall and smart-looking Captain Lavender, with bright eyes and a cowlick that swept a wing of golden hair onto his forehead.

Do you think Jock will come after me?" Boy asked when I recounted the whole story back at Soysambu. "Now that he knows about us?" "Why would he? His whole argument has been about keeping up appearances and avoiding gossip. If anything, he'll make my life harder or dig in more about the divorce." We

I think I could turn and live with animals,' " he read aloud, "they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins….

and an almond-scented blancmange custard that tasted like clouds.

During an interview; Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton. "You know, there's a line at the end of my book that goes, 'This time with Denys would fade, and it would last forever.' That's something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don't get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That's an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true.

are things we find only at our lowest depths. The idea of wings and then wings themselves. An ocean worth crossing one dark mile at a time. The whole of the sky. And whatever suffering has come is the necessary cost of such wonders, as Karen once said, the beautiful thrashing we do when we live.