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Anita Shreve

105quotes
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"The Pilot's Wife," published in 1998, is a novel by Anita Shreve that follows a woman's search for the truth about her husband in the aftermath of a plane crash. It stands as one of her most recognized works and brought her fiction to a wide readership.

Shreve was born on October 7, 1946, in Dedham, Massachusetts, and went on to study at Tufts University. She worked across several forms — journalism, essays, and screenwriting — before establishing herself as a novelist writing in English in the romance genre. Early in her career she lived in Nairobi, Kenya for three years, working as a journalist for an African magazine, an experience that deepened her practice as a writer before she turned more fully to long-form fiction. Her short fiction had already drawn serious attention: a story titled "Past the Island, Drifting" earned her an O. Henry Prize in 1976, marking her as a writer of considerable promise from the outset.

Her career spanned journalism, essays, screenplays, and novels, and she moved between those forms with consistency throughout her working life. She was a citizen of the United States and produced her work in English. The range of her output — from magazine journalism filed abroad to prize-winning short fiction to commercially successful novels — reflects a career built steadily across decades rather than launched by a single moment.

Shreve received the PEN New England Award in recognition of her contributions to literature. She died on March 29, 2018, in Newfields, New Hampshire. That award, along with the O. Henry Prize she had collected more than four decades earlier, marks the arc of a writing life that began in short fiction and extended into novels that reached readers well beyond literary circles.

Quotes by Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve's insights on:

I discover that it is possible to be angry with someone who has died. It is possible to hate yourself for being angry with someone who has died. It is possible to believe that you will die from grief, that somehow your breathing will catch itself up and simply stop. It is possible to believe that you could have stopped the terrible thing that happened at any time, if only you had known.
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I discover that it is possible to be angry with someone who has died. It is possible to hate yourself for being angry with someone who has died. It is possible to believe that you will die from grief, that somehow your breathing will catch itself up and simply stop. It is possible to believe that you could have stopped the terrible thing that happened at any time, if only you had known.
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I loved him,” Muire said. “We were in love.” As if that were enough.
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I loved him,” Muire said. “We were in love.” As if that were enough.
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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.
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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.
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Grace wakes every morning to see if the world has sorted itself out. The.
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Grace wakes every morning to see if the world has sorted itself out. The.
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His arrival detonated two sheepdogs that began barking even before they emerged at a dead run from behind the garage.
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His arrival detonated two sheepdogs that began barking even before they emerged at a dead run from behind the garage.
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Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures.
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Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures.
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She closes her eyes and lets the piano take her somewhere she’s never been.
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She closes her eyes and lets the piano take her somewhere she’s never been.
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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.
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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.
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Something inside me squeezes up tight like a sponge that is being wrung out.
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Something inside me squeezes up tight like a sponge that is being wrung out.
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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.
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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.
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