105 Quotes by Anita Shreve

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.

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.

Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.

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.

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

And this all causes her to wonder at the disparity between the silk dresses and the natural postures of the body, and to think: How far, HOW FAR, we are willing to go to pretend we are not of the body at all.

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.

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.