Anita Shreve quotes

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)

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

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

Anita Shreve

If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.

Anita Shreve

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

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

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

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

Anita Shreve

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

Anita Shreve

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

But how do you ever know that you know a person?

Anita Shreve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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