Quotes from Paula McLain

Sorry was maybe the loneliest feeling of all, I understood, because it only brought you back to yourself.

But when Bumby nursed, his fist clutching the fabric of my robe, his eyes soft and bottomless and locked on mine, as if I were the very heart of his universe, I couldn't help but melt into him.

What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?

People belong together to each other only as long as they believe. He stopped believing.

He didn't know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next. He was at war now, his loyalty tested at every turn.

There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.

There's an old ghost story about that, I remember, 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.

Those early days in Paris were nearly forty years behind him and yet, in the final pages he writes of Hadley, "I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

They sat in the cafes with their fresh faces and long lovely legs and waited for something outrageous to happen.

How some victims don't have even a whisper of no inside them. Because they don't believe the life they have is theirs to save.

I wasn't raised to acknowledge my own feelings, let alone stick up for myself like that.

That's what terrible, sordid situations did to you, made you act crazily, against your own truths, against yourself.

The world needs an army of Wandas—strong, sarcastic, unafraid women who say what they think and act straightforwardly, without apology or permission. Women who roar instead of flinch.

I love you now more than I ever have in some ways and though different people view their marriage vows differently, I meant mine to the death. I'm ready to be yours forever if you must know it, but since you've fallen in love and want to marry someone else, I feel I have no choice but to move aside and let you do that.

You on the train and me here and everything emptier now you're gone. Tell me, are you real?

The people we love never leave us, Anna. You know that already. That's what I mean by spirit. I mean love.

Sleep isn't a skill." I laughed at him. "But of course, señorita. The innocent have it. They're born with it. Somehow you lose it as you age. Worry steals it away.

Anything and anyone could disappear on you, and you could disappear, too, if you didn't have people around who really knew you. Who were there solidly, meeting you exactly where you stood when life grew stormy and terrifying. Who could find you when you were lost and couldn't find yourself, not even in the mirror.

Let's just say I've developed a theory that only the vanished truly leave their mark. And I still don't feel I've sorted it out. Maybe we never do survive our families.

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 don't know how to describe it, but after the blush of my own company wore off, I became so aware of Earnest's absence it was as if the lack of him had moved into the apartment with me.

Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual- if one things about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.

Maybe that's the secret to surviving all sorts of trouble, knowing who you are apart from it, I mean.

It was as if we'd pressed ourselves together until his bones passed through mine and we were the same person, ever so briefly.