181 Quotes by Paula McLain

"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."

"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."

"During an interview;Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton."You know, there's a line at the end of my book that goes, 'This time with Denys would fade, and it would last forever.' That's something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don't get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That's an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true."

"For better for for worse I was born a traveler, wanting to go everywhere and see everything."

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

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

"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 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."

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

"I get suggestions all the time. People feel quite free at events or even on the street to tell me what they think I should be writing. What I've learned, though, is that this thing, this connection, has to be in place for me to be able to kind of launch into a world imaginatively."