“ 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 anot… Anita Shreve
“ 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… Anita Shreve
“ 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… 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… Anita Shreve
“ 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. Anita Shreve
“ 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… Anita Shreve
“ 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 l… Anita Shreve
“ Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks - how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed,… Anita Shreve
“ That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love. Anita Shreve
“ 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… Anita Shreve
“ Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window… Anita Shreve
“ 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. Anita Shreve
“ And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, who… Anita Shreve
“ Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost. Anita Shreve
“ Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true. Anita Shreve
“ 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. Anita Shreve
“ 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… Anita Shreve
