Paula McLain Quotes

I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.

Men hear what they like and invent the rest.

I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!

For most of a day we walked through alkali flats, the white crust like a frosted layer of salt that rose in a powder when your boots punched through. We wore the chalk on us everywhere - up to our knees, in the creases of our fingers clenching the rifle strap, down in the cavity between my breasts, and in my mouth, too. I couldn't keep it out and stopped trying. I couldn't keep anything out, I realized, and that was something I loved about Africa. The way it got at you from the outside in and never let up, and never let you go.

reached behind me to adjust the stockings again. "Your mother doesn't like me." "She just doesn't want to lose me. That's how mothers are.

We called Paris the great good place then, and it was. We invented it after all. We made it with our longing and cigarettes and Rhum St. James; we made it with smoke and smart and savage conversation and we dared anyone to say it wasn't ours. Together we made everything and then we busted it apart again.

I felt a sense of anticipation of being on the verge of something interesting.

All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.

He would eat me here or drag me off to a glade or valley only he knew of, a place from which I'd never return. The last thought I remember having was This is how it feels, then. This is what it means to be eaten by a lion.

You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through.

The Vega Gull is peacock blue with silver wings, more splendid than any bird I've known, and somehow mine to fly. She's called The Messenger, and has been designed and built with great care and skill to do what should be impossible - cross an ocean in one brave launch, thirty-six hundred miles of black chop and nothingness - and to take me with her. It

In some ways, it was as if nothing had changed. Our bodies knew each other so well we didn't have to think about how to move. But when it was over and we lay still, I felt a terrible sadness come down because I loved him as much as I ever did.

I'd never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light.

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.

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.

Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn't look up and didn't stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.

The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same,

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.

Your wife happens to work for me, so I'd say it is." I was sure Jock was going to lunge for Boy. He was much the taller and broader man and could have wrecked Boy without trying - but some tide inside him turned, like a switch going off, and he thought better of it for the moment. "You should be careful, Beryl," he said icily, without taking his eyes from Boy's face. Then he stormed away.

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

We're all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren't your own person at all - are you? The real question is whether or not you will risk what it takes to be happy." She was referring to Jock, but her words made me think of other things, too. "Are you happy, Karen?" "Not yet. But I mean to be.

On December 8, 1921, when the Leopoldina set sail for Europe, we were on board. Our life together had finally begun. We held on to each other and looked out at the sea. It was impossibly large and full of beauty and danger in equal parts-and we wanted it all.

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

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.

Her absence was still so loud and so heavy, I ached with it, feeling hollow and lost. I didn't know how to forget my mother any more than my father knew how he might comfort me.

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

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.

Are you always this wise, Ruth?"
"Only when it comes to other people's lives.

Isn't love a beautiful goddamn liar?

On the third evening, Jock finally sat down across from me, his eyes flat as chips of flint. "This isn't something you can bury in the sand and forget about, Beryl. Go and work for Delamere if that's what you're going to do, but you'll go as my wife." "We'll be pretending then? For how long?" He shrugged. "Don't forget you need me, too. Your father's horses are half mine now, and you can't care for them on a pauper's salary.

about the biting white ants that moved in menacing ribbons over the plains, or the vipers or the sun, which sometimes pulsed so brightly it seemed to want to flatten you or eat you alive.

We'd given up trying to fool anyone, even ourselves.

And that's when he finally tells me his name is Ernest. I'm thinking of giving it away, though. Ernest is so dull, and Hemingway? Who wants a Hemingway?

Did you ever think it could be like this? The way we're happening to each other?

I get why no one bothers with the usual rules," ... "I was in the war, too, you know. Nothing looks or feels the same anymore, so what's the point?" ... "Still, I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else.

It struck me how comfortable I felt with him, as if we were old friends or had already done this many times over, him handing me pages with his heart on his sleeve - he couldn't pretend this work didn't mean everything to him - me reading his words, quietly amazed by what he could do.

I loved the deep smell of the horses and the track itself and the noises of the happy crowd taking its luck as it came.

Bit burrs. Tongue-tying. Saddling for exercise and saddling for races. There was shoeing and bandaging, conditioning and equipment. I had to learn to read track surfaces and stakes sheets, and calculate weight allowances. I had to know the diseases and ailments forward and back - bowed tendons and splints, foundering, bucked shins, bone chips, slab fractures, and quarter cracks. Thoroughbreds were glorious and also fragile in very specific ways. They often had small hearts, and the exertion of racing also made them susceptible to haemorrhaging in the lungs. Undetected colic could kill them - and

I also liked to look around at the houses surrounding the park and wonder about the people who filled them, what kinds of marriages they had and how they loved or hurt each other on any given day, and if they were happy, and whether they thought happiness was a sustainable thing.

You earned him fair and square. He's not mine to take back." He rose to get himself a drink. The peaty odour of scotch flickered up and stung my nose. "I'd like one of those." He looked at me, surprised. "You'll have to go for water." I shook my head. "All right," he said. "I guess you've earned that, too." He handed me the rounded heavy glass, and we sat in silence as the sun retreated. I'd had wine and champagne, but this was different. It made me feel older.

Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved

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.

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

I put some nice thick socks and my Alpine slippers and then curled up in a chair by the fire to read The Beautiful and Damned. 'Fitzgerald's a poet', Shakespear had said when she recommended it, [ ... ]. The writing was exquisite, I had to admit, but it was making me sad to read about Gloria and Anthony. They talked prettily and had nice things, but their lives were hollow. I didn't have the stomach for such a dire picture of marriage, not just now.

I wanted something grand and sweeping."
"The kind of love you find in novels?"
"Maybe. That makes me incredibly stupid, I suppose.

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

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

He stared into his coffee, thinking quietly. "But you've never been afraid of anything, have you?"
"I have, though," I said, surprised at my own emotion. "I've been terrified... I just haven't let it stop me

That's obviously, isn't it?' she said. 'A hawk is always a hawk, except'- and here she raised on heavy eyebrow and gave a mysterious smile - 'except when the hawk is a cabbage.'
'What?' Ernest said, grinning and game and clearly perplexed.
'Exactly,' Gertrude said.

We stood there, locked and lovely as statues in a garden.

He had writing the way other people had religion

What was more exciting than that? I could love him like crazy and work very hard to understand and support him, but I couldn't be fresh eyes and a fresh smile after five years. I couldn't be new.

Walk through your sorrow, my daughter, it hardly matters as long as you walk to where you want to be.

I hope we'll get lucky enough to grow old together.

I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.

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.

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.

They love me like a pack of wolves.


Ernest

How close people could be to us when they had gone as far away as possible, to the edges of the map. How unforgettable.

small gully where the red mud had dried and cracked in a system of parched veins.

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.

There was no back home any more, not in the essential way, and that was part of Paris too. Why we couldn't stop drinking or talking or kissing the wrong people no matter what it ruined. Some of us had looked into the faces of the dead and tried not to remember anything in particular. Ernest was one of these. He often said he'd died in the war, just for a moment; that his soul had left his body like a silk handkerchief, slipping out and levitating over his chest. It had returned without being called back, and I often wondered if writing for him was a way of knowing his soul was there after all, back in its place. Of saying to himself, if not to anyone else, that he had seen what he'd seen and felt those terrible things and lived anyway. That he had died but wasn't dead any more.

I'd like it if you could love me for a little while at least.

I've never travelled," I told her. "Oh, you absolutely should," she insisted, "if only so that you can come home and really see it for what it is. That's my favourite part.

When I rode away from Jock's farm a week later, I took nothing that I couldn't tie onto the back of my saddle - pyjamas, a toothbrush and comb, a second pair of slacks, a man's shirt in heavy cotton. For Pegasus I carried a thick rug and brush, several pounds of crushed oats, and a small, tarnished blacksmith's knife. It felt wonderful to be riding out in the bush and travelling so lightly, but I was also leaving much unsettled behind me. It was a devil's bargain I had struck with Jock.

would be two days traveling, at least, and then he'd be

Only the vanished truly leave their mark. And

Sometimes I've thought it's only our challenges that sharpen us, and change us, too - a mile-long runway and nineteen hundred pounds

Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.

He pulled me into the room and way lay on the featherbed and made love. And I was reminded of what was best about us.
How very easy and natural we could be as bodies, with no sharp angles or missteps and no need for talking.
How in bed, as nowhere else, he was my favorite animal and I was his.

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.

I have fought for independence here, and freedom, too. More and more I find they're not at all the same thing.

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

Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.

How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in.

Nearly anyone might feel like a painter walking the streets of Paris then, because the light brought it out in you, and the shadows alongside the buildings, and the bridges which seemed to want to break your heart, and the sculpturally beautiful women in Chanel's black sheath dresses, smoking and throwing back their heads to laugh. We would walk into any café and feel the wonderful chaos of it, ordering Pernod or Rhum St James until we were beautifully blurred and happy to be there together.

swallowed. My ears felt as if

Who knows what anyone deserves? We like to play judge and jury, but we're all a rotten mess under our skins.

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.

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.

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.

The things of the world knew so much more than we did and lived them more truly. The thorn trees had no grief or fear. The constellations didn't fight or hold themselves back, nor did the translucent hook of the moon. Everything was momentary and endless.

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

The sky had taken Denys, but I knew there was life up there, too
a combination of forces suited to me, to how I was made, in powerful ways. That great soaring freedom and unimaginable grace came fully tethered to risk and to fear. Flying demanded more courage and faith than I actually posessed, 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.

I met the devil,' Ernest said, finishing his glass of wine, 'and he doesn't give a damn about art.

Nothing hurts if you don't let it.

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

The worst events always have the thrust of accidents, as if they come out of nowhere. But that's just lack of perspective.

Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind.

Love is a beautiful liar? Beauty was a liar too.

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

Searching out something important and going astray look exactly the same for a while, in fact.

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

Because it's not always easy to know how to live.

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.

Because you can't chart a course around anything you're afraid of. You can't run from any part of yourself, and it's better that you can't. Sometimes I've thought it's only our challenges that sharpen us, and change us, too - a

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.

What am I meant for then?" "How wonderful that question is, Beru." He smiled mysteriously. "And as you did not die on this day, you have more time in which to answer it.

It's important to test your nerve occasionally,' she said. 'It keeps you young.