181 Quotes by Paula McLain

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

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.

He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.

What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?

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.

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

I didn't answer him and didn't open my eyes, and there was a moment of perfect vertigo, when I heard the whooshing of the surf again and felt I was part of it, swirling with it and also standing still, swept up an sewn into the sea and into the universe, but also very, very alone.

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.

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.