Quotes from Sea Glass

Anita Shreve ·  374 pages

Rating: (22.2K votes)


“Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass


“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, quote from Sea Glass


“But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn't know it was happiness and couldn't have put a name to it then - in fact he's pretty sure he never even thought about it - but now he knows that it was happiness.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass


“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.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass


“Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass



“And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass


“All the picketers look bored and hot and like they”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass


“You have to do what your heart dictates," Vivian says.
"Do you believe that?"
"Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart?”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Sea Glass


About the author

Anita Shreve
Born place: in Dedham, Massachusetts
Born date October 7, 1946
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“I'm sorry you're angry" is NOT an apology.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Revenge of the Spellmans


“I'm staying," Henry said, annoyed.

"Why?"

"Because, if I leave, it would be like abandoning two mentally challenged people in a nuclear waste dump.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans


“QUESTION: Are you suggesting that history is irrelevant, then, and the temporal span of humankind merely the recycling of tropes?
ANSWER: Well, I think it’s two things. It’s always two things, unless it’s three. The first thing is moms and martyrs are the way we will think, just as when we dance we tend to tango. Jung suspected as much, you know, and every story could, I suppose, be seen as such a spyglass. Second, either there is or there isn’t, point-blank, and if there is not, and something besides lead backs our philosophies, then previously Truth flashed its temper like a fictitious schoolgirl showing her panties, then went all cowboy cool in the neonew, barely speaking, keeping mum, despite the fact we’s done forgot dear mammy, savoring the slow satisfying burn of a cigarette before the bonfire of a billion bodies, and still millions more wait their turn, we’re better at keeping our appointments, at any rate, skinny corpses stripped of teeth and hair and skin, difference plucked like daisies, for there is no difference; in ether words, to hear the Great Apes tell it, every plague is one for the pointless and every poppy’s got jack to do with Us. Hoohah! A particularly ballsy bit of business given the most recent nearing too close, we’re singing our rondel with a bellyful of gravy and sourmash, we’re at the highpocked end, and there’s no more to come, come the dawn. Though bear in mind we’ve no pret-a-porter poodle sniffing around here, nossir, we’re not afraid to say stay, still, we’ll stay right here, eating off the apple of your eye, carving the plump of your cheek caught in the family photo, the flash in the pan goes off and so does your head, or so Buttercup says, we’re stuck, that is to say, in the over-brought dawn of this new clearer Age, in which we play patsy to witness just this: everything is beauty-full, in its own way. . . .”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa


“I couldn't reach him from here even if I tried.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas


“I read somewhere that flying is like throwing your soul into the heavens and racing to catch it as it falls."

"I don't think mine would ever fall," he murmured, looking at the clear cold sky.”
― Linda Howard, quote from Mackenzie's Mountain


Interesting books

Twice Born
(3.9K)
Twice Born
by Margaret Mazzantini
The Death of the Heart
(5.3K)
The Death of the Hea...
by Elizabeth Bowen
Asking For It
(9.8K)
Asking For It
by Louise O'Neill
School's Out - Forever
(103.6K)
School's Out - Forev...
by James Patterson
Fractured
(10.6K)
Fractured
by Dani Atkins
The Confectioner's Tale
(1K)
The Confectioner's T...
by Laura Madeleine

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.