Top 88 Anita Shreve Quotes
#1. Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.
Anita Shreve
#2. 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
#3. A calamity, a catastrophe- it changes everything, doesn't it? It makes you aware that you cannot be indifferent toward your life. You cannot simply give away your life.
Anita Shreve
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. All the picketers look bored and hot and like they
Anita Shreve
#7. There are more experiences in life than you'd think for which there are no words.
Anita Shreve
#8. 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
#10. I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?
Anita Shreve
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Something inside me squeezes up tight like a sponge that is being wrung out
Anita Shreve
#14. 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
#15. Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.
Anita Shreve
#16. 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
#17. The lying started in the eighth grade. Possibly it had begun earlier, and I simply hadn't noticed.
Anita Shreve
#18. I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make.
Anita Shreve
#19. Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.
Anita Shreve
#20. The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating.
Anita Shreve
#21. Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.
Anita Shreve
#22. 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
#24. Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures
Anita Shreve
#25. The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly.
Anita Shreve
#26. And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.
Anita Shreve
#27. 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
#28. She thinks of all that will have to be done to dismantle a life.
Anita Shreve
#29. 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
#30. I love working alone. Crave it, in fact. I feel truly alive then.
Anita Shreve
#31. 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
#32. I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
Anita Shreve
#33. 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
#34. But how do you ever know that you know a person?
Anita Shreve
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.
Anita Shreve
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Schoolboy, a teenager, with a teenager's innocence and
Anita Shreve
#44. That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.
Anita Shreve
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?
Anita Shreve
#48. Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.
Anita Shreve
#49. 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
#50. As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences.
Anita Shreve
#51. Were you frightened?
One gets tired of being frightened, wouldn't you agree?
Anita Shreve
#52. Love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.
Anita Shreve
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.
Anita Shreve
#57. The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.
Anita Shreve
#58. 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
#59. The enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.
Anita Shreve
#60. I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.
Anita Shreve
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.
Anita Shreve
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. If one has a good reputation and trusted, the rules can be bent to accommodate.
Anita Shreve
#69. 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
#71. Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe.
Anita Shreve
#72. She's a good person to hug, because her body fills up all the empty spaces.
Anita Shreve
#73. To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
Anita Shreve
#74. To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.
Anita Shreve
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. -Do you recognize suffering? -I hope I do. -Injustice? -Again, I hope I would. -Then you are a political man.
Anita Shreve
#82. A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go.
Anita Shreve
#83. I worried constantly. I felt that my son was chipping away at me. This small thing and then that small thing.
Anita Shreve
#84. It is time that determines the intensity of love.
Anita Shreve
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.
Anita Shreve
#88. 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
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