Quotes from The Pilot's Wife

“To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“But how do you ever know that you know a person?”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“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.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“And she thought then how strange it was that disaster—the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face—could be at times, such a thing of beauty.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“No matter how often Kathryn observed the phenomenon, she found it hard to comprehend: the way nothing could remain as it had been, not a house that was falling down, not a woman's face that had once been beautiful, not childhood, not a marriage, not love.

You have to let this happen to you, he said quietly. It has its own momentum.

But how do you ever know that you know a person?

Aren't we enough? she asks again.

Odd she thought, how a fact, seen one way, was one thing. And then, seen from a different angle, was something else entirely. Or perhaps not so odd.

Of all people, he said, this should not have happened to you.

She thought about the impossibility of ever knowing another person. About the fragility of the constructs people make. A marriage, for example. A family.

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“her skin, which she has hardly”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“Es decir, ellos, como todas las otras parejas que ha conocido, viven en un estado de suave declive, de convertirse, de modo sutil y sin torturas, cada día en algo menos de lo que eran el día anterior.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

“Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.”
― Anita Shreve, quote from The Pilot's Wife

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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.