Quotes from Anita Shreve

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.

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.

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

It was probably not so unusual to be a different person with a different man, for all parts were authentically within, waiting to be coaxed out by one person or another

She's a good person to hug, because her body fills up all the empty spaces.

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.