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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
Character
Degree
Body
Degrees
Sometimes
Struggle
Life
Successful
Impulses
Call
Contain
Natural
Represents
Spirit
Endeavor
Seems
Impulse

More quotes by 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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I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?
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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To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.
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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There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.
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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Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.
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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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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That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.
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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But how do you ever know that you know a person?
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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I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
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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love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.
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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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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I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.
Anita Shreve