Quotes from Paula McLain

This is why tourists come to wine country, not just to get tipsy from tiny pours of Cabernet Sauvignon, but to be inside this world, where every surface mirrors back the sun.

More than anyone I'd known, Denys understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend.

How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in.

and he grinned a grin that began in his eyes and went everywhere at once. It was devastating.

Mary Lovell's Straight On Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham was the first biography to bring Beryl to light, in 1987, and her pioneering efforts and careful research have been crucial to my own and other writers' abilities to imagine Beryl's life. Mary Lovell also compiled Beryl Markham's stories in The Splendid Outcast, a collection that wouldn't have been available otherwise, and for that

But some of us, a very few in the end, bet on marriage against the odds. And though I didn't feel holy, exactly, I did feel that what we had was rare and true—and that we were safe in the marriage we had built and were building every day. This

Knowing that he should impress Bob meant that Ernest was ineluctably drawn to offend him.

He had writing the way other people had religion

But what else is there? If we give up now, we're done for." "I might just crawl under my bed and not come out until I'm old and doddering and can't remember feeling anything for anyone at all." She nodded. "You want to, but you won't.

When things got hard and you felt shaky, she liked to say, you could hit your knees wherever you were, and the world would be there to catch you.

The real question is whether or not you will risk what it takes to be happy.

With the things that matter most, we guard them carefully. Sometimes we tell no one, and sometimes just one person, the one who knows us best.

rounded blue-grey hills that went smoky and purple at dusk before dissolving into the night sky. When we

This is your life's work for a reason. The things you've lost have drawn you to help these children and young women. I think you know that already, but you can't see what I can.

Finnegans Wake, several

The ghosts of the kids you've helped, they hang on you like stars.

This valley was more than my home. It beat in me like the drum of my own heart. Only

endlessly charming.

How sadness and shame are more than feelings; they're an illness, a terrible cancer that spins through the world taking lives in a hidden cyclical way that might never end.

that came when you knew that if life didn't go exactly

How anyone with a hole inside them will search on and on, sometimes all their lives, for ways to fill it.

swallowed. My ears felt as if

And sometimes I think there isn't anything to us but our mistakes.

I learned most of my Swahili there, more and more eager for stories…how the hyena had got his limp and the chameleon his patience. How the wind and rain had once been men before they failed at some important task and were banished to the heavens.