16 Quotes & Sayings By Paula Mclain

Paula McLain is the author of several bestselling novels, including The Paris Wife. Her novels, Love in the Time of Cholera and The Paris Wife, were both finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Paula has written for various national publications and taught creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in San Francisco with her family and attends a local synagogue with her husband and two children.

1
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 Paula McLain
2
Not everyone believed in marriage then. 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
3
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. Paula McLain
4
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. Paula McLain
5
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
6
I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone. Paula McLain
7
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. Paula McLain
8
He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins. Paula McLain
9
There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city. Paula McLain
10
Sometimes when you're hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight. Paula McLain
11
We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone. Paula McLain
12
Denys had a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. He 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 resistence or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend. Paula McLain
13
They love me like a pack of wolves. Ernest Paula McLain
14
In Paris, you couldn’t really turn around without seeing the result of lovers’ bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all. Paula McLain
15
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. Paula McLain