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

Bees chase flowers. — Tracy L. Shreve

My house feels like home when you're there. — Susan Richards Shreve

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

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. — William Faulkner

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

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

It's hard navigating life in a leaky boat. Meet me on the water, Lord. — Crissy 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don't know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoievski was the first man to reveal his soul to me?"

Henry Miller — Henry Miller Shreve

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

You reap what you sow. — 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

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

Tidal waves surge forward,
And in their wake, Stale water is replenished.
(Haiku from Chapter Thirty, SHADOWWATER) — Wendy Shreve

In the late 1990s, I wrote a book from the point of view of a young black woman who has barricaded herself in her college dorm room, pursued by a man, either real or imagined, who finally materializes as the father she has never known. — Susan Shreve

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

As a child, I was an observer, a listener for the stories of grown-ups. I led a quiet, solitary life with my mother, interrupted in the evenings by the arrival of my father who preferred to live in a state of emergency. — Susan Shreve

As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences. — 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

Quentin did not answer, staring at the window; then he could not tell if it was the actual window or the window's pale rectangle upon his eyelids, though after a moment it began to emerge. It began to take shape in its same curious, light, gravity-defying attitude
the once-folded sheet out of the wistaria Mississippi summer, the cigar smell, the random blowing of the fireflies. "The South," Shreve said. "The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years." It was becoming quite distinct. He would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now.
"I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died," Quentin said. — William Faulkner

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

My mother was a talker, but there are still so many things I want to ask her. She died when I was forty. But she did teach me to be a talker with my own children. — Susan Shreve

I'm sick in the heart," Blister aid, climbing into the car. "I don't need the doctor."
"Heartsick is the worst," Daisy G. said. — Susan Richards Shreve

All the picketers look bored and hot and like they — 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

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

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

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

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

Now. 1973. Exactly." He tipped back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. "So much changed in the sixties, the war, the rights of women, civil rights, the vote, protest against the war. On and on. I was getting my Ph.D. in Chicago and you were in college but that time was upheaval with a purpose. Now we've drawn back into our shells, wondering what we have done and what do we believe.? And is there any purpose to our lives? — Susan Richards Shreve

The rules for raising children had gone out with her parents generation of daughters who had lived as Lucy had, in patient silence, acting by standards which had lasted generations, waiting to grow up to make their decisions, following the patterns of their own lives. — Susan Richards Shreve

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes. — James Wright

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

Be pleasant, patient, and professional, please. — Susan Richards Shreve

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

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

Whether they realized it or not, they were doubting possibility, and the unknown. They believed I would fail. And when we only believe what has been said before, what has been done before, we give our own power away. Possibility evaporates; potential melts and seeps away deep into the earth below us. We cut ourselves short by thinking this way. I have always felt that it is from what we believe that our lives are created, not the other way around. — Shreve Stockton

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

Mirnin: Where's Shreve? — Rachel Caine

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

My mother listened to everything I said, carefully - not that what I said was particularly interesting, but I was her daughter. — Susan Shreve

Lucy settled into August's kitchen as if they were a family. — Susan Richards 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

It's so egotistical to believe that we know more about someone else's reality than they do, and such a waste of time. — Shreve Stockton

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

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

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

I hate to confess that I would love to have all of my children in Washington - and at the same time, they've been all over the place, and my heart of hearts, I believe that freedom is wonderful. — Susan 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

Porter is my eldest child, and I tended to be fiercely protective when he was criticized. He actually was not a big complainer about school. Simply selective in what he chose to do and say. — Susan Shreve

So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms. — Susan Shreve