Anita Shreve Quotes

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  • Writer
  • born 1946
  • 58 quotes

Anita Shreve, a writer (born 1946), is quoted 58 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Love Is, Thinking, Might and Struggle.

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

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

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

I love working alone. Crave it, in fact. I feel truly alive then.

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

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

love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.

Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.

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

I start writing at 7.30 A.M. and write till noon. I've never written a single word after 5.00 P.M.

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

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

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

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

Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The weight of his losses finally too much to bear. But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.

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.

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 is quoted on

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