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
Past
Grains
States
Tipping
Mind
Grain
Already
Maybe
State
Happiness
Hourglass
Running
Sifting

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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My life was my life I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.
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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.
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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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I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.
Paula McLain
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... and yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way.
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And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.
Paula McLain
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Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved
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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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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.
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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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But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.
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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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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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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 never met anyone so vibrant or alive. He moved like light.
Paula McLain
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You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through.
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