Quotes from Paula McLain

If you think about it, most of us have very little choice about what we're going to become or who we're going to love, or what place on earth chooses us, becoming home. All we can do is go when we're called, and pray we'll still be taken in.

How unbelievably naïve we both were that night. We clung hard to each other, making vows we couldn't keep and should never have spoken aloud. That's how love is sometimes. I already loved him more than I'd ever loved anything or anyone. I knew he needed me absolutely, and I wanted him to go on needing me forever.

Have you ever seen stars like this? You can't have. They don't make them like this anywhere in the world." Above our heads, the sky was a brimming treasure box. Some of the stars seemed to want to pull free and leap down onto my shoulders—and though these were the only ones I had ever known, I believed Denys when he said they were the finest. I thought I might believe anything he said, in fact, even though we had just met. He had that in him.

Getting married had been all his idea, but he hadn't told her how very afraid of it he was. He seemed to need to force his way through it anyway, as he did with everything that scared him terribly. He was afraid of marriage and he was afraid of being alone, too.

They love me like a pack of wolves. Ernest

In the same way that fish had quickness, cats had a way of being still. That was their gift, and you could learn a lot by watching them get there.

Beginning are important, too, darling. You should be patient with life.

I hope we'll get lucky enough to grow old together. You see them on the street, those couples who've been married so long you can't tell them apart. How'd that be?" "I'd love to look like you," I said. "I'd love to be you.

They'd scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms—not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.

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

I had come alive here...this was my home, and though one day it would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted exactly to me. A place I knew by heart. The one place in the world I'd been made for.

The affair begun and ended, the damage done and the repairs under way, my battered heart on the mend. Because he would break my heart. I already knew that if nothing else.

Your biological parents give you their genes, the map of your physical self. But whoever raises you makes you who you are, for better or for worse. Family dynamics are acted out, not built in, though someday scientists might prove otherwise.

You've done it now, haven't you? It's too late to take anything back and you wouldn't anyway. You need to remember that later, when you see your wife and want to die for hurting her. Remember no one made you do anything. It's never anyone but you who does anything, and for that reason alone you shouldn't be sorry

a lot of the time we don't tell anyone because we can't.

What we can't bear to know or feel, we often find a way to hide from ourselves, and hide well.

the damage has been simmering for years and has no doubt found other ways to erupt, in feelings of shame or hopelessness, drawing her unconsciously to people and situations that echo or approximate the original pain.

We can only go to the limits of ourselves—I've learned that if nothing else. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone. - Beryl Markham

There's so much to lose." "There always is," she said. I sighed and reached for another biscuit. "Are you always this wise, Ruth?" "Only when it comes to other people's lives.

To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too—that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.

It's not what you carry, but how you can learn to carry it.

I have so many schemes about writing – so much I want to see and feel and do.

What are you thinking? Just of how much you've changed me. This is why there is poetry. For days like these.

It was august. for years it was august … . there was heat like wet gauze and a high, white sky and music coming from everywhere at once.