105 Quotes by Anita Shreve

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

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

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.

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

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

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

But after a while, that too passes, and she and Jack go back to normal, as they have been before, which is to say that they, like all the other couples Kathryn has ever known, live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less than they were the day before.

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.