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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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Anita Shreve
Age: 71 †
Born: 1946
Born: October 7
Died: 2018
Died: March 29
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dedham Massachusetts
Anita Hale Shreve
Life
Breaths
Threaten
Thinks
Pause
Causes
Pauses
Desire
Stops
Often
Sentence
Olympia
May
Midst
Uttering
Soul
Sentences
Preoccupied
Thinking
Breath
Dissolve

More quotes by 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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The weight of his losses finally too much to bear. But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.
Anita Shreve
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I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
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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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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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
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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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Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.
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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I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.
Anita Shreve
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And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.
Anita Shreve
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love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.
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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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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To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
Anita Shreve
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Love and marriage are wonderful arenas in which to place a character. We are most likely to risk our morals and beliefs while in love. Betrayal gives tremendous insights into a character as well.
Anita Shreve
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Good luck, I'm beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it - no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is - the most incomprehensible idea of all.
Anita Shreve
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If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.
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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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