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

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.
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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THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER is raw, honest and completely captivating. Kathleen Kent takes what would seem to be a familiar subject and gives it a fresh, new perspective-moving us through a wrenching gamut of emotions as she does so. A searing look at one of the worst periods in our history.
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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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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I loved him, Muire said. We were in love. As if that were enough.
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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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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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.
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