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

Anita Shreve

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Anita Shreve
Age: 71 †
Born: 1946
Born: October 7
Died: 2018
Died: March 29
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dedham Massachusetts
Anita Hale Shreve
Lived
Possibility
Struggle
Words
Enduring
Life
Capture
Possibilities
Endure
Infinite

More quotes by Anita Shreve

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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.
Anita Shreve
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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
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I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?
Anita Shreve
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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.
Anita Shreve
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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.
Anita Shreve
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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.
Anita Shreve
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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
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To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.
Anita Shreve
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There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.
Anita Shreve
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If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.
Anita Shreve
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Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.
Anita Shreve
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That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.
Anita Shreve
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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.
Anita Shreve
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I loved him, Muire said. We were in love. As if that were enough.
Anita Shreve
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But how do you ever know that you know a person?
Anita Shreve
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A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go.
Anita Shreve
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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.
Anita Shreve
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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.
Anita Shreve
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I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make.
Anita Shreve
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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.
Anita Shreve