Top 58 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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

WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER is raw, honest and completely captivating. Kathleen Kent takes what would seem to be a familiar subject and gives it a fresh, new perspective-moving us through a wrenching gamut of emotions as she does so. A searing look at one of the worst periods in our history.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Odd, she thought, 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. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are.

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

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

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

The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.

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

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

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

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