Quotes from Paula McLain

They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn't solve anything and didn't save anyone even a little bit? What then?

I can't see how I'll make it a year this way," he said. "It seems impossible, I know. But when we're old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.

Whatever they were, they were living their lives, out there doing it, making their mistakes. Somehow I'd gotten stuck along the way […] and I didn't know how to free myself exactly.

The universe doesn't do random.

It was terrible to feel so empty, as if I were nothing. Why couldn't I be happy? And just what was happines anyway?

What do you mean to do?' 'Make literary history, I guess.

i liked feeling strong and was uncomfortable knowing that had vanished whne he left. was my happiness so completely tied to him now that i could only feel like myself when he was near? i had no idea.

When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for—distilling places and people and objects to their essential qualities.

People like what they know. It's human nature.

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. —Frederick Buechner

There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts.

I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.

You can take a cub from the savannah as they have, and raise it like a pet if you like. In a cage, as some do, or running free like Paddy. You can feed it fresh meat so it never learns to hunt and brush its coat so it carries a human smell wherever it goes—but know that what you've done is twist something natural into something else. And you can never trust on unnatural thing. - Charles Clutterbuck

It had been a false spring, a lie like all the other lies, and I found myself wondering it it would ever really come.

Flying demanded more courage and faith than I actually possessed, and it wanted my best, my whole self. I would have to work very hard to be any good at it at all, and be more than a little mad to be great, to give my life over to it. But that's just what I meant to do.

On safari, I saw Denys in sharper relief than I ever had. He had an infallible compass, and a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. 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.

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.

I was falling in love, and it was wonderful, and it was awful.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn't know what she meant then. My heart had been broken lots of times, and I was supposed to say thank you? Now, all these years later, I'm at least starting to see that she was really talking about the whole journey. That it's impossible to be alive and not get hurt sometimes, not if you're doing it right.

You know, we don't always understand what we're living inside of, or how it will matter. We can guess all we want and prepare, too, but we never know how it's going to turn out.

Do you think we can ever leave the past behind?' he said. 'I don't know. I hope so.

If you guys can't make it, what chance do the rest of us have?

Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?

That was the thing about experience. It took distant strangers and made them a family. A family of one moment. There was no other way to see it, even as we scattered to the wind.