Quotes from Anita Shreve

kind of necessary acceptance will form around her, like a lobster making its new shell, one that will be soft and easily breakable in the beginning but so hard that only lobster crackers can shatter it in the end. She can hardly wait.

A calamity, a catastrophe- it changes everything, doesn't it? It makes you aware that you cannot be indifferent toward your life. You cannot simply give away your life.

Do you recognize suffering? -I hope I do. -Injustice? -Again, I hope I would. -Then you are a political man.

With her children in the backyard, and her foot taped, Grace stands at the kitchen counter with a pencil and a pad of paper. She knows from long experience that sometimes a list is the only way from one side to the other.

One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.

The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly.

The air is sharp, and I understand why years ago sea air was prescribed as a tonic for the body.

The lying started in the eighth grade. Possibly it had begun earlier, and I simply hadn't noticed.

The beauty makes her miss Aidan with an ache that feels unbearable. she replays the night they had together, moment by moment. Will she spend her life missing him?

Were you frightened? One gets tired of being frightened, wouldn't you agree?

I can see the years that Thomas and I have had together, the fragility of that life. The creation of a marriage, of a family, not because it has been ordained or is meant to be, but because we have simply made it happen. We have done this thing, and then that thing, and then that thing, and I have come to think of our years together as a tightly knotted fisherman's net; not perfectly made perhaps, but so well knit I would have said it could never have been unraveled. During

If you suspect a problem, there is a problem. Don't let them get away with even the very first lie. Be vigilant.

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.

Grace wonders if Tom and Claire will one day visit her and have a similar sensation of home. Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit

been literally breathtaking

her skin, which she has hardly

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

to talk at length about her mother and father, whom she has not seen since their deaths in the late 1800s. The greatest insight to emerge from those sessions was that Etna

Etna know to be true, since Dr. Little seldom speaks during her time with him. He will neither confirm nor deny her insights, a practice that invariably makes her more anxious when she leaves his office than when

Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures?

There was a hierarchy in the universe, she told me, and I would be happy

The creative impulse, the thing that gets deep inside me, goes from brain to the fingertips. When you're writing by hand, even when you're not consciously thinking about it, you're constructing sentences in the best way possible. And I still get the thrill of the clean pad of notepaper and the pencil all sharpened.

should be paid to the unlikelihood of

gave up her child without so much as a note or a dollar, and what excuse did she have? None. She was not poor. She was not the victim of brutality. And the child, whatever else his circumstances, had been conceived in love. That much was true. How could she have so easily given the child away? Olympia