Quotes from Anita Shreve

But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn't know it was happiness and couldn't have put a name to it then - in fact he's pretty sure he never even thought about it - but now he knows that it was happiness.

Beauty, Olympia has come to understand, has incapacitated her mother and ruined her life, for it has made her dependent upon people who are desirous of seeing her and of serving her.

and is it not true that in our extreme youth we possess the capacity to see more clearly and absorb more intensely the beauty that lies all before us, and so much more so than in our later youth or in our adulthood, when we have been apprised of sin and its stain and our eyes have become dulled, and we cannot see with the same purity, or love so well?

And though her husband will appear to come alive, she knows that it is lust - too quickly ignited and too quickly extinguished - that animates him.

Rowan is leaving him. She's been leaving him for months.

Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.

All the picketers look bored and hot and like they

You have to do what your heart dictates, Vivian says. Do you believe that? Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart?

her feet and legs. The children are silent, as if awed by the sound. "A fuel tank in a house on Seventh Street," she

Even a plain woman will attract the eye if she is happy, while the most elaborately coiffed and bejeweled woman in a room, if she cannot summon contentment, will seem to be merely decorative.

You know, Honora says, you read a word like massacre and you think, I know what that means. It means the slaughter of innocent people. And then you go on. You read another fact. You read the word trial. Or conviction. But then....when it happens to you, when you live the word, you realize that the word itself means nothing. It tells you nothing at all. It doesn't begin to convey the horror, does it?

Years had passed, and all of life was different now.

one's ability to believe in the notion that two souls which stir in the universe may be destined to meet and may be meant only for each other?

good shoveling—and then I walk

At the Shoals, men have always fished for haddock and for hake, for porgies and for shad. In 1614, Captain John Smith first mapped the islands and called them Smythe's Isles, and he wrote that they were a heape together.

schoolboy, a teenager, with a teenager's innocence and

For how very different a woman will look when she has happiness, Olympia knows, when her beauty emanates from a sense of well-being or from knowing herself to be greatly loved. Even a plain woman will attract the eye if she is happy, while the most elaborately coiffed and bejeweled woman in a room, if she cannot summon contentment, will seem to be merely decorative.

He plays, and she dfrits along the curvature of the earth. He plays, and her body is flooded with gratitude. He plays, and she understands that the end us coming. When he stops, she can't speak. Words will break the trance, will sound trivial and tried. She'd have to wish him good luck, and he'd return the phrase. Perhaps he'd tell her that he would write to her. And everything they had just experienced would be punctuated by the commonplace. When he walks by her, he holds out his hand.

Night would settle in like slow blindness

Es decir, ellos, como todas las otras parejas que ha conocido, viven en un estado de suave declive, de convertirse, de modo sutil y sin torturas, cada día en algo menos de lo que eran el día anterior.

He will be her one-room cottage, her oasis.

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left." ? Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife

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.