Quotes from Paula McLain

There's an old ghost story about that, I remember, about how the devil steals souls by asking for them openly. He isn't a thief, but a master manipulator. The real danger, or so the story goes, isn't in the devil himself, but in not knowing you have a choice to turn him away.

He'd left me for a time. He'd doubted me, but now he was mine again and I wanted to keep him here in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets until I'd quieted every last voice and we were only right again.

But for some of us who watched the shadows deepen all through that fall of 1936, there was no such thing as a foreign war.

reached behind me to adjust the stockings again. "Your mother doesn't like me." "She just doesn't want to lose me. That's how mothers are.

I still don't understand how I deserve her, or how she's come to me, but I'm grateful anyway,

There's death in life, Anna, things too impossible to bear. So many things, and yet we bear them.

I loved the deep smell of the horses and the track itself and the noises of the happy crowd taking its luck as it came.

I came to see that Harrison wasn't my failed prince and I wasn't in his victim. He hadn't led me on at all; I'd led myself on.

I didn't feel old enough to be anyone's wife, or that I knew enough or had lived enough, or understood the essential things. I didn't know how to say any of this to Jock, either. That I was afraid of the promises we'd made. That late at night as I lay beside him in bed I felt lonely and numb, as if some part of me had died.

though I leaned against him and tried to meet the kiss and to take it in, I couldn't quite feel it. I couldn't feel us. —

I had never spent so much time by the sea, and hated the way the air thickened with salt and sat on my skin and made me always long for a bath. I was far more comfortable with dust.

what happens to us that matters most, but how we can learn to carry it. I'm starting to understand the difference, and how maybe the only way we can survive what's here, and what we are, is together.

The poem seemed to be about how naturally dignified animals are and how their lives make more sense than those of humans, which are cluttered with greed and self-pity and talk of a distant God.

Pe atunci, ziceam c? Parisul e minunea minunilor, ?i a?a ?i era. La urma urmei, noi l-am inventat. Noi l-am creat, cu dorurile noastre, cu ?ig?rile ?i romul St. James; l-am pl?smuit din fum ?i conversa?ii de?tepte, crude, ?i vai de cei care ar fi spus c? nu e al nostru. Împreun? am f?cut tot, apoi l-am desf?cut iar în buc??i.

the boy, who

It may be the luckiest and purest thing of all to see time sharpen to a single point. To feel the world rise up and shake you hard, insisting that you rise, too, somehow. Some way. That you come awake and stretch, painfully. That you change, completely and irrevocably—with whatever means are at your disposal—into the person you were always meant to be.

This is everything I love. It's all right here. We're our own country.

No one really knows how it is with anyone else. That's the truth. That's our only real retaliation when the gossip starts to churn.

The Vega Gull is peacock blue with silver wings, more splendid than any bird I've known, and somehow mine to fly. She's called The Messenger, and has been designed and built with great care and skill to do what should be impossible—cross an ocean in one brave launch, thirty-six hundred miles of black chop and nothingness—and to take me with her. It

I was thinking about forgiveness today. You know, so many people get confused about what it is, binding it up with guilt. Feeling ashamed about things they never had any control over in the first place. I don't believe forgiveness is something we have to kill ourselves trying to earn. It's already here, all around us, like rain. We just have to let it in.

Then the rudder and elevator finally come to life, swinging her nose up, and she's left the earth—arrow straight. A butterfly after all.

It's hard to care about people. You end up fretting all the time and feeling helpless, hoping they'll live forever. Only no one does." "Yes, that's love for you.

I never travelled," I told her. "Oh, you absolutely should," she insisted, "if only so that you can come home and really see it for what it is. That's my favourite part.

I didn't answer him and didn't open my eyes, and there was a moment of perfect vertigo, when I heard the whooshing of the surf again and felt I was part of it, swirling with it and also standing still, swept up an sewn into the sea and into the universe, but also very, very alone.