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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

And though her husband will appear to come alive, she knows that it is lust - too quickly ignited and too quickly extinguished - that animates him.

One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.

Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.

Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.

You have to do what your heart dictates, " Vivian says. "Do you believe that?""Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart?

The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating.