Quotes from Paula McLain

Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.

When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.

We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone.

On December 8, 1921, when the Leopoldina set sail for Europe, we were on board. Our life together had finally begun. We held on to each other and looked out at the sea. It was impossibly large and full of beauty and danger in equal parts-and we wanted it all.

Are you always this wise, Ruth?" "Only when it comes to other people's lives.

All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.

There 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 that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?

Sometimes our dreams can be the most revealing things about us. Who we are when no one's looking, who we believe we're truly supposed to be, if we can get there.

Men hear what they like and invent the rest.

You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through.

Miwanzo is the word in Swahili for "beginnings." But sometimes everything has to end first and the bottom drop out and every light fizzle and die before a proper beginning can come along.

I'd like it if you could love me for a little while at least.

Some people feel out of place when they're young, not because anything's wrong with them, but because there's something special that sets them apart. Something they haven't figured out yet.

How close people could be to us when they had gone as far away as possible, to the edges of the map. How unforgettable.

The first time I saw a narcissus pushing through ice and thriving, I thought it was perfect and wanted that kind of determination for myself.

Even when other things come in loud, we have to keep choosing each other. That's marriage. You can't only say the words once and think they'll stick. You have to say them over and over, and then live them with all you've got.

I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.

and yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way.

I hope we'll get lucky enough to grow old together. You can see them on the street, those couples who've been married so long you can't tell them apart.

He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, the tip flaring an angry red. "Isn't love a beautiful goddamn liar?

Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

We're all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren't your own person at all—are you? The real question is whether or not you will risk what it takes to be happy." She was referring to Jock, but her words made me think of other things, too. "Are you happy, Karen?" "Not yet. But I mean to be.

You make your life with someone and you love that person and you think it's enough. But it's never enough, is it? I couldn't say. I don't know anything about love anymore.