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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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Anita Shreve
Age: 71 †
Born: 1946
Born: October 7
Died: 2018
Died: March 29
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dedham Massachusetts
Anita Hale Shreve
Life
Successful
Impulses
Call
Contain
Natural
Represents
Spirit
Endeavor
Seems
Impulse
Character
Degree
Body
Degrees
Sometimes
Struggle

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.
Anita Shreve
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But how do you ever know that you know a person?
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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I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.
Anita Shreve
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Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.
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, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.
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