“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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“He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew too that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of relief.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from The Burgess Boys
“Too many rules about monogamy. So”
― Tracy Brogan, quote from Crazy Little Thing
“All the gifts, virtues and graces of the Holy Ghost are distributed by Mary, to whom she wishes, when she wishes, the way wishes and as much as she wishes.”
― St. Louis de Montfort, quote from True Devotion to Mary
“Tune, tune,” said Porch briskly. He turned to Orson. “And is there a word for today?” Orson was the word person, spilling words out as if they were notes on a staff. “Rebarbative,” said Orson promptly. “Causing annoyance or irritation. Mozart’s rebarbative music causes me to want to throw up.” Porch sighed. Orson preferred Schubert.”
― Patricia MacLachlan, quote from The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt
“I just figured that was the life I picked, so I had to make the most of it.”
― Claire Cook, quote from Must Love Dogs
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