Quote

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
Causes
Pauses
Desire
Stops
Often
Sentence
Olympia
May
Midst
Uttering
Soul
Sentences
Preoccupied
Breath
Dissolve
Thinking
Breaths
Threaten
Life
Thinks
Pause

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I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?
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To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.
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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.
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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.
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the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.
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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.
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But how do you ever know that you know a person?
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love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.
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There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.
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Odd 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 as you had imagined.
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To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
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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.
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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.
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If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.
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I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
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Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.
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