Anita Shreve - The Pilot's Wife (1998)

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

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

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

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

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