“Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“Sometimes I wish we could rub out all of our mistakes and start fresh, from the beginning,' I said. 'And sometimes I think there isn't anything to us but our mistakes.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He stopped believing.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“Why is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“You are everything good and straight and fine and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you’ve carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You’ve changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That’s one thing I’ve learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“He was such an enigma, really - fierce and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn't one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“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.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“More and more I find myself at a loss for words and didn't want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty. I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“I'd never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“I hope we'll get lucky enough to grow old together.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“Ernest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian words 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 were the walls were and tended to them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“She was also incredibly confident, with a way of moving and talking that communicated that she didn't need anyone to tell her she was beautiful or worthwhile.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“How unbelievably naive 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.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“Knowing he was suffering pained me. That’s the way love tangles you up. I couldn’t stop loving him, and couldn’t shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him— but I also didn’t have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“I knew that I could hate him all I wanted for the way he was hurting me, but I couldn’t ever stop loving him, absolutely, for what he was.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“It was our favorite part of the day, this in-between time, and it always seemed to last longer than it should--a magic and lavender space unpinned from the hours around it, between worlds.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“There are things I didn't see before, like how nice it is to have someone around. Not the white knight whisking you away, but the fellow who sits at your table every night and tells you what he is thinking.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“He and I had already had our time, and though it was still very close and real to me, as beautiful and poignant as any place on a map, it was, in truth, another time—another country.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“There was only today to throw yourself into without thinking about tomorrow, let alone forever. To keep you from thinking, there was liquor, an ocean's worth at least, all the usual vices and plenty of rope to hang yourself with.
Love is a beautiful liar.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
“Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind.”
― Paula McLain, quote from The Paris Wife
Paula McLain
Born place: in Fresno, California, The United States
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“He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into the low places. Like that—and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, “Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this hand has.” And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went. I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able even to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive—old, old—when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“Everybody should have at least one girlfriend who can make her laugh.”
― Lisa Scottoline, quote from Dirty Blonde
“At the same time they both caught sight of a third curly flourish on a tree-trunk right in front of them, but it was terribly high up, at least three feet above the ground.
"That's it, I'm sure," said Sniff, stretching himself. "I must be taller than I thought!”
― Tove Jansson, quote from Comet in Moominland
“I liked to put young and old in the same room, because they would certainly have different takes on the same problem.”
― Antonio J. Méndez, quote from Argo: How the CIA & Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History
“mean that if you spend your time putting the love of your heart into what you do for those who are not your friends, you may often be disappointed and discouraged. But if you keep on trying you will find your happiness in loving, whether you are loved back or not.”
― Patricia St. John, quote from Treasures of the Snow
Locked
Attrition: the First...
Super-Cannes
Taking Back Forever
After We Collided
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