Anita Shreve Quotes

Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.

To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.

The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It's a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny moments and some larger ones.

If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.

I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.

Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions - the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions.

Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.

In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune's Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire.

THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER is raw, honest and completely captivating. Kathleen Kent takes what would seem to be a familiar subject and gives it a fresh, new perspective-moving us through a wrenching gamut of emotions as she does so. A searing look at one of the worst periods in our history.

Odd how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love-soaked, drenched in love-only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined.

Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.

I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.

Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.

And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.

Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

But how do you ever know that you know a person?

And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.

Love and marriage are wonderful arenas in which to place a character. We are most likely to risk our morals and beliefs while in love. Betrayal gives tremendous insights into a character as well.

I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?

I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make.

Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.

love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.

Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?

The weight of his losses finally too much to bear. But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go.

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.

Good luck, I'm beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it - no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is - the most incomprehensible idea of all.

I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.

the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.