Love and Ruin Quotes

“Even when other things come in loud, we have to keep choosing each other. That's marriage. You can't only say the words once and think they'll stick. You have to say them over and over, and then live them with all you've got.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn’t look up and didn’t stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“He talks about the gift of being lost in the woods. I’ve always found that comforting, somehow. That maybe you have to be truly lost before you can find yourself again.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Anything and anyone could disappear on you, and you could disappear, too, if you didn’t have people around who really knew you. Who were there solidly, meeting you exactly where you stood when life grew stormy and terrifying. Who could find you when you were lost and couldn’t find yourself, not even in the mirror.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Sleep isn’t a skill.” I laughed at him. “But of course, señorita. The innocent have it. They’re born with it. Somehow you lose it as you age. Worry steals it away.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“I was falling in love, and it was wonderful, and it was awful.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“That was the thing about experience. It took distant strangers and made them a family. A family of one moment. There was no other way to see it, even as we scattered to the wind.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“People like what they know. It’s human nature.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“All the distances I had traveled, trying to be myself, didn’t matter here, where nothing ever changed. Not the mahogany furniture or the art or the books in their placement on the shelves. Not the eggshell sheen on the walls, or the quality of light coming through the stained-glass window on the landing. This was the light of childhood. I was all the ages I had ever been.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Beginning are important, too, darling. You should be patient with life.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“In the same way that fish had quickness, cats had a way of being still. That was their gift, and you could learn a lot by watching them get there.”
― Paula Mclain, Love and Ruin

“Maybe we are always all of our ages at once, like nesting matryoshka dolls?”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“My mind knew it was all finished, but the heart never knows, or if it does, it does only at the very last possible moment.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“For seven years Ernest had been not so much in my heart and mind as in my very blood cells. And now I would have to learn to live without him. How? Where could one learn to do that kind of amputation, and walk away alive, and still be the same person?”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Ernest always said there was a season for everything. A season to love and be loved. To work and rest your bones and your spirit. To dream and to doubt, to fear and to fly. What season was this, then, if not one of ruin?”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“I wish I could break into pieces,” I told him one night, just a week after I’d come back. “That would feel better somehow. Isn’t the worst when you can keep on walking and breathing and writing letters and going to the market and all the things you do when you’re alive, but really you’re blown apart?”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“I want to be passionate about things and feed my mind and travel the world. I’d rather be darkly and dangerously happy, like living on a knife’s edge, than lose my way and forget my nature.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“We were both straining to bend and compromise for the other. But that was what marriage was about, wasn’t it?”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Is it nice? It’s hard to care about people. You end up fretting all the time and feeling helpless, hoping they’ll live forever. Only no one does.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Places change us, don’t they? Sometimes more than we can even guess.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Sometimes the only antidote for pain is more of it.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“Perhaps Ernest’s marriage meant, as I’d said, that there was no cliff to fling myself from. But what did that matter when love itself was an ocean, and you could drown in even a teacup of it?”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“I didn’t say a word to Alfred or Mother, just let myself look at him for a moment, as a tourist looks at a map. His legs were brown and muscled as a prizefighter’s. His arms were brown, too, and his chest was broad, and everything about him suggested physical strength and health and a kind of animal grace. The whole picture made an impression, but I wasn’t going to trot over there and confess that I had his photo in my handbag, marking the page of my mystery novel. I’d clipped it from Time magazine, and also the long article alongside it, that he’d written about bullfighting. I didn’t want to stammer out how meaningful his writing was to me, or abase myself by claiming I was a writer, too.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, For Whom the Bell Tolls”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“You need to learn to live with yourself, not others,” he went on. “That’s the difficult part. When you learn to accept your own nature, it will start to feel peaceful, not frantic.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“I was just as terrified that even if he did finally choose me, our love wouldn’t be the lasting kind.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“We each have to make our choices, and then find a way to live with them. And if we can't, well then, that's when we know something has to change.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin

“went off full of fire and conviction and derring-do.”
― Paula McLain, Love and Ruin