Paula Mclain

“The way I see it, how can you really say you'll love a person longer than love lasts?”

“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.”

“They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn't solve anything and didn't save anyone even a little bit? What then?”

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

“He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, the tip flaring an angry red. “Isn’t love a beautiful goddamn liar?”

“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.”

“Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual- if one things about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.”

“But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.”

“Men hear what they like and invent the rest.”

“The worst events always have the thrust of accidents, as if they come out of nowhere. But that's just lack of perspective.”

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

“Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.”

“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.”

“But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.”

“Knowing he was suffering pained me. That’s the way love tangles you up. I couldn’t stop loving him, and couldn’t shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him— but I also didn’t have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.”

“All that was left for me was a terrible kind of paralysis, this waiting game, this heartbreak game.”

“People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He stopped believing.”

“In some ways, it was as if nothing had changed. Our bodies knew each other so well we didn’t have to think about how to move. But when it was over and we lay still, I felt a terrible sadness come down because I loved him as much as I ever did.”

“You are everything good and straight and fine and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you’ve carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You’ve changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That’s one thing I’ve learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost.”

“He and I had already had our time, and though it was still very close and real to me, as beautiful and poignant as any place on a map, it was, in truth, another time—another country.”

“Веднъж Ърнест ми каза ,че английското paradaise-тоест "рай"-идва от персийска дума ,означаваща "оградена градина". Тогава усетих ,че разбира колко необходими за нашето щастие са обещанията ни един към друг.Не можеш да имаш истинска свобода,ако не знаеш къде са стените и не се грижиш за тях.Можехме да се облягаме на стените,защото те съществуваха ,те съществуваха ,защото се облягахме на тях. С идването на Полин всичко започна да се руши. Вече нищо не ми изглеждаше трайно,освен останалото зад мен-онова,което вече бяхме направили и преживели заедно.”

“To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.”

“Ernest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian words that meant walled garden. I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn't have real freedom unless you knew were the walls were and tended to them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them.”

“It was the end of Ernest's struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this unhappy.”

“He wanted them both, but there was no having everything, and love couldn't help him now. Nothing could help him but bravery, and what was that anyhow?”

“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.”

“I don't know how to describe it, but after the blush of my own company wore off, I became so aware of Earnest's absence it was as if the lack of him had moved into the apartment with me.”

“I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.”

“It had been a false spring, a lie like all the other lies, and I found myself wondering it it would ever really come.”

“There's so much to lose.""There always is," she said.I sighed and reached for another biscuit. "Are you always this wise, Ruth?""Only when it comes to other people's lives.”

“We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.”

“You have to digest life. You have to chew it up and love it all through.”

“Not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved”

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

“There are things I didn't see before, like how nice it is to have someone around. Not the white knight whisking you away, but the fellow who sits at your table every night and tells you what he is thinking.”

“Are you always this wise, Ruth?" "Only when it comes to other people's lives.”

“I wanted something grand and sweeping.""The kind of love you find in novels?""Maybe. That makes me incredibly stupid, I suppose.”

“How unbelievably naive we both were that night. We clung hard to each other, making vows we couldn't keep and should never have spoken aloud. That's how love is sometimes. I already loved him more than I'd ever loved anything or anyone. I knew he needed me absolutely, and I wanted him to go on needing me forever.”

“I'd like it if you could love me for a little while at least.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I loved him for a full year and then, in one night, all my wishing came apart.”

“At twenty-eight I'd had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.”

“All her stories seemed to involve rowboats and ukuleles, full moons and campfires and grog. I was desperately jealous.”

“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.”

“I can't see how I'll make it a year this way," he said."It seems impossible, I know. But when we're old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.”

“You make your life with someone and you love that person and you think it's enough. But it's never enough, is it?I couldn't say. I don't know anything about love anymore.”

“He didn't know how love managed to be a garden one moment and war the next.”

“I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant.”

“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.”