Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor. Anita Shreve More Quotes by Anita Shreve More Quotes From Anita Shreve 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 kissingsweetmemories Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost. Anita Shreve lostlyingfirsts There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words. Anita Shreve thinking To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game. Anita Shreve rejectiongamesfeelings A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It's a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny moments and some larger ones. Anita Shreve hellotinyrooms If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance. Anita Shreve skating-on-thin-icedancemight Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping. Anita Shreve stoppingmatterfeet I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured. Anita Shreve faithfulhas-beensmean The weight of his losses finally too much to bear. But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived. Anita Shreve lightstruggleloss And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room. Anita Shreve griefmightway I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective. Anita Shreve love-isnightthinking A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. Falling in love can do that, you think. And so can a wild party. You marvel at the way each has the power to forever alter an individual's compass. And it is the knowing that such a thing can so easily happen, as you did not know before, not really, that has fundamentally changed you and your son. Anita Shreve falling-in-lovepartyson Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you. Anita Shreve love-isinspirationallove Good luck, I'm beginning to discover, is just as baffling as the bad. There never seems to be a reason for it - no sense of reward or punishment. It simply is - the most incomprehensible idea of all. Anita Shreve punishmentgood-luckideas That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love. Anita Shreve jealouspassionlife I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do. Anita Shreve bodydrinkingfeelings Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations. Anita Shreve disasterhealchildren Odd 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. Anita Shreve wellsoddpersons Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times. Anita Shreve hurtwaterthinking I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave? Anita Shreve behaveifswonder
