Quotes from Paula McLain

The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same,

I was just as terrified that even if he did finally choose me, our love wouldn't be the lasting kind.

There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Perhaps Ernest's marriage meant, as I'd said, that there was no cliff to fling myself from. But what did that matter when love itself was an ocean, and you could drown in even a teacup of it?

Sometimes the only antidote for pain is more of it.

People belong to each other only as long as they both believe.

Places change us, don't they? Sometimes more than we can even guess.

Is it nice? It's hard to care about people. You end up fretting all the time and feeling helpless, hoping they'll live forever. Only no one does.

We were married at All Saints on a sun-shocked Wednesday in October, two weeks before my seventeenth birthday. The legal marrying age was eighteen then, but my father thought I was old enough, and that seemed good enough for me.

It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it.

you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars—one, two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself.

We were both straining to bend and compromise for the other. But that was what marriage was about, wasn't it?

I want to be passionate about things and feed my mind and travel the world. I'd rather be darkly and dangerously happy, like living on a knife's edge, than lose my way and forget my nature.

I wish I could break into pieces," I told him one night, just a week after I'd come back. "That would feel better somehow. Isn't the worst when you can keep on walking and breathing and writing letters and going to the market and all the things you do when you're alive, but really you're blown apart?

Was my happiness so completely tied to him now that I could only feel like myself when he was near?

Ernest always said there was a season for everything. A season to love and be loved. To work and rest your bones and your spirit. To dream and to doubt, to fear and to fly. What season was this, then, if not one of ruin?

For seven years Ernest had been not so much in my heart and mind as in my very blood cells. And now I would have to learn to live without him. How? Where could one learn to do that kind of amputation, and walk away alive, and still be the same person?

My mind knew it was all finished, but the heart never knows, or if it does, it does only at the very last possible moment.

rnest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian word that meant "walled garden." I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn't have real freedom unless you knew where the walls were and tended them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them.

Maybe we are always all of our ages at once, like nesting matryoshka dolls?

I ran into Berkeley Cole again. It had been two years since my coming-out party, that night he and Denys Finch Hatton had recited poetry for me in blindingly white coats,

A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered. It doesn't help if you're a soldier. The effect is the same.

My father died when I was young. We all thought it was rather fortunate at first. It simplified all sorts of things. But over time…well. 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.

He wanted them both, but there was no having everything, and love couldn't help him now. Nothing could help him but bravery, and what was that anyhow?