The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Anita Shreve

A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.

Live, Long, Kind

WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience.

Life, Travel, Women

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.

clever, poverty, true

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.

Later, when she sees the photographs for the first time, she will be surprised at how calm her face looks – how steady her gaze, how erect her posture. In the picture her eyes will be slightly closed, and there will be a shadow on her neck. The shawl will be draped around her shoulders, and her hands will rest in her lap. In this deceptive photograph, she will look a young woman who is not at all disturbed or embarrassed, but instead appears to be rather serious. And she wonders if, in its ability to deceive, photography is not unlike the sea, which may offer a benign surface to the observe even as it conceals depths and current below.

deception, photographs, the-sea

Odd, she thought, 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. Or weren’t quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

knowing-a-person, love, loving

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.

jealousy, love, relationships

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.

writing, writing-process

And though her husband will appear to come alive, she knows that it is lust – too quickly ignited and too quickly extinguished – that animates him.

extinguish, ignite, lust

And this all causes her to wonder at the disparity between the silk dresses and the natural postures of the body, and to think: How far, HOW FAR, we are willing to go to pretend we are not of the body at all.

The things that don’t happen to us that we’ll never know didn’t happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn’t meet because she couldn’t get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don’t know what they are.