“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, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“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.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“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, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“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, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“It is time that determines the intensity of love.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“Altogether, Olympia thinks the sight of herself satisfactory, but not beautiful: a smile is missing, a certain light about the eyes. For how very different a woman will look when she has happiness, Olympia knows, when her beauty emanates from a sense of well-being or from knowing herself to be greatly loved. Even a plain woman will attract the eye if she is happy, while the most elaborately coiffed and bejeweled woman in a room, if she cannot summon contentment, will seem to be merely decorative.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“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, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“... she suddenly looks different to Olympia, physically different, as though a portrait has been alterred. And Olympia thinks that possibly such adjustments might have to be made for everyone she knows. Upon meeting a person, a sketch is formed, and for the life of the relationship, however intimate or not, a portrait is painted, with oils or pastels or with black ink or with watercolor, and only at a persons's death can the portraits be considered finished. Perhaps not even at the person's death.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“And as she watches, she discovers that a dream creates a nonexistent intimacy, that one feels, all the next day after the dream, as though certain words have been said or actions taken which have not. So that the object of the dream feels familiar, when, in fact, no familiarity exists at all.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“should be paid to the unlikelihood of”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“gave up her child without so much as a note or a dollar, and what excuse did she have? None. She was not poor. She was not the victim of brutality. And the child, whatever else his circumstances, had been conceived in love. That much was true. How could she have so easily given the child away? Olympia”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“Beauty, Olympia has come to understand, has incapacitated her mother and ruined her life, for it has made her dependent upon people who are desirous of seeing her and of serving her.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
“For how very different a woman will look when she has happiness, Olympia knows, when her beauty emanates from a sense of well-being or from knowing herself to be greatly loved. Even a plain woman will attract the eye if she is happy, while the most elaborately coiffed and bejeweled woman in a room, if she cannot summon contentment, will seem to be merely decorative.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Fortune's Rocks
Anita Shreve
Born place: in Dedham, Massachusetts
Born date October 7, 1946
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“Do people call you Ollie?” Lola asked.
Oliver looked at her, completely dumbfounded by the possibility of this nickname. She may as well have asked him if people call him Garth, or Andrew, or Timothy.
“No,” he said flatly, and the only thing charming about him was the way his accent seemed to run through every vowel with one syllable. Lola’s eyebrow twitched in her single tell—mildly annoyed—and she lifted her flashing LED drink cup to her lips.
Lola wears mostly black, including her glossy dark hair, and has a tiny diamond pierced into her lip, but, even still, she’s never been able to pull off the full physical manifestation of the angry Riot Grrrl. With her perfect porcelain skin and the longest eyelashes in the world, she’s simply too delicate. But once she decides you’re an asshole, it no longer matters to her what you think. She gives good glare.
“The flower suits you,” she said, tilting her head to study him. “And you have pretty hands, kind of soft. Maybe we should call you Olive.”
He grunted out a dry laugh.
“And a really beautiful mouth,” I added. “Gentle. Like a woman’s.”
“Aw fuck off.” He was laughing outright by then.”
― Christina Lauren, quote from Dirty Rowdy Thing
“They are all very serious people with stern expressions on their faces. They discuss nothing but important matters and like to philosophize a great deal, while at the same time everyone can see that the workers are detestably fed, sleep without suitable bedding, thirty to forty in a room with bedbugs everywhere, the stench, the dampness, and the moral corruption... Obviously all our fine talk has gone on simply to hoodwink ourselves and other people as well. Show me the day nurseries that they're talking about so much about. And where are the libraries? Why, they just write about nurseries and libraries in novels, while in fact not a single one even exists. What does exist is nothing but dirt, vulgarity, and a barbarian way of life... I dislike these terribly serious faces, they frighten me, and I'm afraid of serious conversations, too. We'd be better off if we all would just shut up for a while!”
― Anton Chekhov, quote from The Cherry Orchard
“In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.”
― Chris Heimerdinger, quote from Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites
“I stare at Isabel without blinking. I stare until I can see the pale roots of her natural hair and the expensive skin cream that changed her skin from milk to olive and the colored lenses that gave her yellow eyes and I wonder how she changed her breasts and ass and shortened her legs. I stare at her until her eyes are pointed and her teeth glitter like fangs and I have to close my eyes. If she said her name was Lucy and she faked her death I would believe her.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Kiss Me, Judas
“For the first time ever, I felt ashamed of my species. The volcano had taken our homes, our food, our automobiles, and our airplanes, but it hadn't taken our humanity. No, we'd given that up on our own.”
― Mike Mullin, quote from Ashfall
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