Anita Shreve Quotes & Sayings

She's a good person to hug, because her body fills up all the empty spaces. — Anita Shreve

The enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived. — Anita Shreve

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

I start writing at 7.30 A.M. and write till noon. I've never written a single word after 5.00 P.M. — Anita Shreve

Beauty, Olympia has come to understand, has incapacitated her mother and ruined her life, for it has made her dependent upon people who are desirous of seeing her and of serving her. — Anita Shreve

Schoolboy, a teenager, with a teenager's innocence and — Anita Shreve

WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit. — Anita Shreve

I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

I can think of no other experience quite like that of being 20 or so pages into a book and realizing that this is the real thing: a book that is going to offer the delicious promise of a riveting story, arresting language and characters that will haunt me for days. — Anita Shreve

Altogether, Olympia thinks the sight of herself satisfactory, but not beautiful: a smile is missing, a certain light about the eyes. For how very different a woman will look when she has happiness, Olympia knows, when her beauty emanates from a sense of well-being or from knowing herself to be greatly loved. Even a plain woman will attract the eye if she is happy, while the most elaborately coiffed and bejeweled woman in a room, if she cannot summon contentment, will seem to be merely decorative. — Anita Shreve

And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage. — Anita Shreve

She suddenly looks different to Olympia, physically different, as though a portrait has been alterred. And Olympia thinks that possibly such adjustments might have to be made for everyone she knows. Upon meeting a person, a sketch is formed, and for the life of the relationship, however intimate or not, a portrait is painted, with oils or pastels or with black ink or with watercolor, and only at a persons's death can the portraits be considered finished. Perhaps not even at the person's death. — Anita Shreve

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

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist. — Anita Shreve

Kind of necessary acceptance will form around her, like a lobster making its new shell, one that will be soft and easily breakable in the beginning but so hard that only lobster crackers can shatter it in the end. She can hardly wait. — Anita Shreve

If one has a good reputation and trusted, the rules can be bent to accommodate. — Anita Shreve

Voltage crossed the distance between Sheila and Webster. A current composed of anger and remorse and something else-the last flicker of attraction — Anita Shreve

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

Webster, as if he's done it every day of his life, as if he did it just the day before, trails his fingers from the small of Sheila's back to the nape of her neck.
Sheila turns her head, "Go slowly and be careful," she says. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

You reap what you sow. — Anita Shreve

-Do you recognize suffering? -I hope I do. -Injustice? -Again, I hope I would. -Then you are a political man. — Anita Shreve

The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly. — Anita Shreve

My mother taught me to knit when I was seven. I forgot about knitting until one day I saw Marion at the counter with hers and confessed that I knew how. Confessed is the right word. In those days, in the early 1980s, knitting was not a hobby a preteen would readily admit to. But Marion, every enthusiastic, pounced upon me and insisted that I show her something I'd made. I did
a misshapen scarf
which she priased exravagantly. she lent me a raspberry-colored wool for another project, a hat for myself. Since then I've been knitting pretty continuously. It's addictive and it's soothing, and fora a few minutes anyway, it makes me feel closer to my mother. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end. — Anita Shreve

All the picketers look bored and hot and like they — Anita Shreve

My favourite books series as a young child was the Frank L. Baum 'Wizard of Oz' series. They were beautifully written, oversized fat books with wonderful type and illustrations. — Anita Shreve

I love working alone. Crave it, in fact. I feel truly alive then. — Anita Shreve

Love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

Good shoveling - and then I walk — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn't know it was happiness and couldn't have put a name to it then - in fact he's pretty sure he never even thought about it - but now he knows that it was happiness. — Anita Shreve

But after a while, that too passes, and she and Jack go back to normal, as they have been before, which is to say that they, like all the other couples Kathryn has ever known, live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less than they were the day before. — Anita Shreve

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

Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she wonders if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observe even as it conceals depths and current below. — Anita Shreve

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

Just wanted to know how you're feeling,
As I sit here and think of your progress,
It takes a lot of time, the process of healing,
I hope this poem helps with some of your stress.
I am amazed at your internal strength,
Through it all, your positivity remains,
You're not deterred by magnitude or length,
Nor all your obstacles and physical pains.
You have taught me about the meaning of hope,
I never hear you fuss or complain,
One step at a time, you focus and cope,
When you get better, we'll dance in the rain. — Anita Shreve

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

There are more experiences in life than you'd think for which there are no words. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

Gave up her child without so much as a note or a dollar, and what excuse did she have? None. She was not poor. She was not the victim of brutality. And the child, whatever else his circumstances, had been conceived in love. That much was true. How could she have so easily given the child away? Olympia — Anita Shreve

I worried constantly. I felt that my son was chipping away at me. This small thing and then that small thing. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

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

The lying started in the eighth grade. Possibly it had begun earlier, and I simply hadn't noticed. — Anita Shreve

I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers. — Anita Shreve

It's a wonder any of us make it. — Anita Shreve

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

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. — Anita Shreve

I have a Facebook page and a website. Beyond that, I'm actually a very private person. I'd rather see the focus on the books than on me. — Anita Shreve

The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating. — Anita Shreve

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

She thinks of all that will have to be done to dismantle a life. — Anita Shreve

I discover that it is possible to be angry with someone who has died. It is possible to hate yourself for being angry with someone who has died. It is possible to believe that you will die from grief, that somehow your breathing will catch itself up and simply stop. It is possible to believe that you could have stopped the terrible thing that happened at any time, if only you had known. — Anita Shreve

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

I have spent many hours on the beach collecting sea glass, and I almost always wonder, as I bend to pick up chunk of bottle green or a shard of meringue white, what the history of the glass was. Who used it? Was it a medicine bottle? A bit of a ship's lantern? Is that bubbled piece of glass with the charred bits inside it from a fire? — Anita Shreve

But how do you ever know that you know a person? — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

Something inside me squeezes up tight like a sponge that is being wrung out — Anita Shreve

A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel. — Anita Shreve

Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

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

Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head. — Anita Shreve

What they want seems so simple-time together, a lifetime together, or what is left of a lifetime together-and yet that small goal, he knows, is fraught with endless complications: a maze of responsibilities and commitments, deceptions and betrayals. Why, why, why he asks himself silently for the hundredth time, couldn't they have remained somehow connected-in touch , with all that phrase implies-until they were old enough to find each other again? — Anita Shreve

A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

And this all causes her to wonder at the disparity between the silk dresses and the natural postures of the body, and to think: How far, HOW FAR, we are willing to go to pretend we are not of the body at all. — Anita Shreve

Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

It is time that determines the intensity of love. — Anita Shreve

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination? — Anita Shreve

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

It was probably not so unusual to be a different person with a different man, for all parts were authentically within, waiting to be coaxed out by one person or another — Anita Shreve

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 ... — Anita Shreve

Were you frightened?
One gets tired of being frightened, wouldn't you agree? — Anita Shreve

I brought pictures to the inn, to show you who I'd been, but I saw at once my mistake, the hurt in your eyes, and you said, It hurts that I wasn't with you. — Anita Shreve

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

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting. — Anita Shreve

She felt with the shiver the rare sensation that she was exactly where she should be. She was an idea, a memory, one perfect possibility out of an infinite number. — Anita Shreve

She noticed this time that his eyes weren't really gray, but green, and that perhaps they were set too close together. His forehead was awfully high, and when he smiled, his teeth were slightly crooked. And there was something cocky in his manner, but that might just be the salesman in him, she thought. Honora laid these flaws aside as one might overlook a small stain on a beautifully embroidered tablecloth one wanted to buy, only later to discover, when it was on the table and all the guests were seated around it, that the stain had become a beacon, while the beautiful embroidery lay hidden in everybody's laps. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

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

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. — Anita Shreve

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

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? — Anita Shreve

If you suspect a problem, there is a problem. Don't let them get away with even the very first lie. Be vigilant. — Anita Shreve

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve

And as she watches, she discovers that a dream creates a nonexistent intimacy, that one feels, all the next day after the dream, as though certain words have been said or actions taken which have not. So that the object of the dream feels familiar, when, in fact, no familiarity exists at all. — Anita Shreve

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. — Anita Shreve