Anita Shreve Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Anita Shreve

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

Anita Shreve

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anita Shreve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anita Shreve

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

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

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

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

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