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Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.

Paula McLain

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Paula McLain
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: October 7
Author
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Fresno
California
Freedom
Awfully
Tied
Complicated
Either
Happiness

More quotes by Paula McLain

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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
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And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.
Paula McLain
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Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind.
Paula McLain
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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.
Paula McLain
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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
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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
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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
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My life was my life I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.
Paula McLain
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But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.
Paula McLain
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... and yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way.
Paula McLain
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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
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The way I see it, how can you really say you'll love a person longer than love lasts?
Paula McLain
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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
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I'd never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light.
Paula McLain
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I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.
Paula McLain
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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
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I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.
Paula McLain
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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
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All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.
Paula McLain
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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