ASAnita Shreve

27 collected words

Anita Shreve

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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

Anita Shreve / quote

02Undated

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

Anita Shreve / quote

03Undated

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 / quote

04Undated

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

Anita Shreve / quote

05Undated

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

Anita Shreve / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

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 / quote

08Undated

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.

Anita Shreve / quote

09Undated

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 / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

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 / quote

12Undated

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

Anita Shreve / quote

13Undated

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 / quote

14Undated

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

Anita Shreve / quote

15Undated

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 / quote

16Undated

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

Anita Shreve / quote

17Undated

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 / quote

18Undated

Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.

Anita Shreve / quote

19Undated

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 / quote

20Undated

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 / quote

21Undated

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 / quote

22Undated

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 / quote

23Undated

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

Anita Shreve / quote

24Undated

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 / quote