Top 50 Anita Shreve Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you’re skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.”

— Anita Shreve

2. “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

3. “Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.”

— Anita Shreve

4. “Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love. William Shakespeare, Hamlet.”

— Anita Shreve

5. “There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.”

— Anita Shreve

6. “I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make.”

— Anita Shreve

7. “Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?”

— Anita Shreve

8. “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

9. “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

10. “A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go.”

— Anita Shreve

11. “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

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

— Anita Shreve

13. “I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.”

— Anita Shreve

14. “I discover that it is possible to be angry with someone who has died. It is possible to hate yourself for being angry with someone who has died. It is possible to believe that you will die from grief, that somehow your breathing will catch itself up and simply stop. It is possible to believe that you could have stopped the terrible thing that happened at any time, if only you had known.”

— Anita Shreve

15. “To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.”

— Anita Shreve

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Love is never as ferocious as when you think it’s going to leave you.”

— Anita Shreve

19. “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

20. “And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.”

— Anita Shreve

21. “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

22. “To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.”

— Anita Shreve

23. “I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?”

— Anita Shreve

24. “There are moments in your life when you know that the sentence that will come next will change your life forever, although you realize, even as you are anticipating this sentence, that your life has already changed. Changed some time ago, and you simply didn’t know it.”

— Anita Shreve

25. “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.”

— Anita Shreve

26. “Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.”

— Anita Shreve

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Something inside me squeezes up tight like a sponge that is being wrung out.”

— Anita Shreve

30. “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

31. “The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly.”

— Anita Shreve

32. “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

33. “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.”

— Anita Shreve

34. “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

35. “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

36. “One day a man has a job, and life is full of possibilities. The next day the job and the car are gone, and the man cannot look his wife in the eye.”

— Anita Shreve

37. “Grace wakes every morning to see if the world has sorted itself out. The.”

— Anita Shreve

38. “Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.”

— Anita Shreve

39. “The air is sharp, and I understand why years ago sea air was prescribed as a tonic for the body.”

— Anita Shreve

40. “I can see the years that Thomas and I have had together, the fragility of that life. The creation of a marriage, of a family, not because it has been ordained or is meant to be, but because we have simply made it happen. We have done this thing, and then that thing, and then that thing, and I have come to think of our years together as a tightly knotted fisherman’s net; not perfectly made perhaps, but so well knit I would have said it could never have been unraveled. During.”

— Anita Shreve

41. “She closes her eyes and lets the piano take her somewhere she’s never been.”

— Anita Shreve

42. “I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.”

— Anita Shreve

43. “It’s a wonder any of us make it.”

— Anita Shreve

44. “With her children in the backyard, and her foot taped, Grace stands at the kitchen counter with a pencil and a pad of paper. She knows from long experience that sometimes a list is the only way from one side to the other.”

— Anita Shreve

45. “Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.”

— Anita Shreve

46. “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.”

— Anita Shreve

47. “His arrival detonated two sheepdogs that began barking even before they emerged at a dead run from behind the garage.”

— Anita Shreve

48. “She felt with the shiver the rare sensation that she was exactly where she should be. She was an idea, a memory, one perfect possibility out of an infinite number.”

— Anita Shreve

49. “A calamity, a catastrophe- it changes everything, doesn’t it? It makes you aware that you cannot be indifferent toward your life. You cannot simply give away your life.”

— Anita Shreve

50. “A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual’s compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son.”

— Anita Shreve