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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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If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?
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.
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To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
Anita Shreve
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Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.
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There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.
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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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Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?
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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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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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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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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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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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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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