“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
“India is a place where colour is doubly bright. Pinks that scald your eyes, blues you could drown in.”
― Kiran Millwood Hargrave, quote from The Girl of Ink and Stars
“High summer and one can hear the universe; so overwhelming is e accumulated sound of growing in the meadow and in hedges, of pollen being released, of particles moving in the heat, that all the minute motions together create a continuous him: the sound of summer.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“A measure of the strength of a body's gravity is the speed with which a projectile must be fired to escape its grasp. It takes 11.2 kilometers per second to escape from the Earth. This speed is tiny compared with that of light, 300,000 kilometers per second, but it challenges rocket engineers constrained to use chemical fuel, which converts only a billionth of its so-called mass 'rest-mass energy' (Einstein's mc^2) into effective power. The escape velocity from the sun's surface is 600 kilometers per second-still only one fifth of one percent of the speed of light.”
― Martin J. Rees, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
“In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us.”
― Mark Rowlands, quote from The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness
“It’s always good to go home.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from The Passenger
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.
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