Quotes from Paula McLain

In Paris, you couldn't really turn around without seeing the result of lovers' bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.

Dreams can tell us a lot of things," I go on. "They're a kind of map of the inner life. Sometimes thinking of who we might someday be is the only way we can get through the reality of who we actually are.

In some ways, it was as if nothing had changed. Our bodies knew each other so well we didn't have to think about how to move. But when it was over and we lay still, I felt a terrible sadness come down because I loved him as much as I ever did.

Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn't look up and didn't stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.

I saw him on the cover of Life magazine and heard about the wars he covered bravely and the other feats - the world-class fishing, the big-game hunting in Africa, the drinking enough to embalm a man twice his size.The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time - but under this, I knew he was still lonely.

What's wrong with all of us, Bill? Can you tell me that?' 'Hell if I know', he said. 'We drink too much for starters. And we want too much, don't we?

I get why no one bothers with the usual rules," ... "I was in the war, too, you know. Nothing looks or feels the same anymore, so what's the point?" ... "Still, I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else.

All her stories seemed to involve rowboats and ukuleles, full moons and campfires and grog. I was desperately jealous.

I loved him for a full year and then, in one night, all my wishing came apart.

He talks about the gift of being lost in the woods. I've always found that comforting, somehow. That maybe you have to be truly lost before you can find yourself again.

it struck me how comfortable I felt with him, as if we were old friends or had already done this many times over, him handing me pages with his heart on his sleeve - he couldn't pretend this work didn't mean everything to him - me reading his words, quietly amazed by what he could do.

Young writers, they're almost always autobiographical, even when they don't mean to be.

Because everyone wants to be looked for, whether they realize it or not.

Searching out something important and going astray look exactly the same for a while, in fact.

It's not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it. You need to heal yourself. Your child self too, Anna. Make room for her. Find a way to let her in.

The worst events always have the thrust of accidents, as if they come out of nowhere. But that's just lack of perspective.

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 whatever suffering has come is the necessary cost of such wonders, as Karen once said, the beautiful thrashing we do when we live.

I've sometimes thought that being loved a little less than others can actually make a person, rather than ruin them.

Nearly anyone might feel like a painter walking the streets of Paris then, because the light brought it out in you, and the shadows alongside the buildings, and the bridges which seemed to want to break your heart, and the sculpturally beautiful women in Chanel's black sheath dresses, smoking and throwing back their heads to laugh. We would walk into any café and feel the wonderful chaos of it, ordering Pernod or Rhum St James until we were beautifully blurred and happy to be there together.

Oh." It seemed I'd surprised him. "There isn't a lot of that kind of thinking around here." "Of course there is," I told him, trying to draw a smile. "It's just usually a man who's doing it.

I wanted something grand and sweeping." "The kind of love you find in novels?" "Maybe. That makes me incredibly stupid, I suppose.

He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.

At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.

It's important to test your nerve occasionally,' she said. 'It keeps you young.