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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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Anita Shreve
Age: 71 †
Born: 1946
Born: October 7
Died: 2018
Died: March 29
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dedham Massachusetts
Anita Hale Shreve
Causes
Action
Never
Life
Veer
Direction
Meant
Cause
Single

More quotes by Anita Shreve

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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 laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.
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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the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.
Anita Shreve
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love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.
Anita Shreve
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I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.
Anita Shreve
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And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.
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 leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
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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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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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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Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.
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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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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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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There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.
Anita Shreve
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But how do you ever know that you know a person?
Anita Shreve
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I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.
Anita Shreve
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And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.
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