Quote

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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Paula McLain
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: October 7
Author
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Fresno
California
Mind
Grain
Already
Maybe
State
Happiness
Hourglass
Running
Sifting
Past
Grains
States
Tipping

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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.
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Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.
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Dogs are easy. If their tails are up and their eyes are soft, you're in.
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The way I see it, how can you really say you'll love a person longer than love lasts?
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Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.
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You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through.
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I'd never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light.
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And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.
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My life was my life I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.
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All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.
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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.
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Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved
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It was our favorite part of the day, this in-between time, and it always seemed to last longer than it should--a magic and lavender space unpinned from the hours around it, between worlds.
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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.
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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.
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But when Bumby nursed, his fist clutching the fabric of my robe, his eyes soft and bottomless and locked on mine, as if I were the very heart of his universe, I couldn't help but melt into him.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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