Shreve Quotes

The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are. ~ Anita Shreve

It may be true that you can't judge a book by its cover," Daisy G. had told Blister just last summer. "But the cover tells you something about the book and don't ever pretend it doesn't. ~ Susan Richards Shreve

Kind of necessary acceptance will form around her, like a lobster making its new shell, one that will be soft and easily breakable in the beginning but so hard that only lobster crackers can shatter it in the end. She can hardly wait. ~ Anita Shreve

I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings. ~ Anita Shreve

My mother was a talker, but there are still so many things I want to ask her. She died when I was forty. But she did teach me to be a talker with my own children. ~ Susan Shreve

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting. ~ Anita Shreve

A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel. ~ Anita Shreve

It is time that determines the intensity of love. ~ Anita Shreve

Are you high?" Michael asked him, in a totally colorless voice.
Myrnin blinked, and looked at Claire for help. "He means, are you on drugs."
"Well, obviously."
"More than usual?"
"Oh. No, no, just the usual doses. And where is Shreve?"
"Eve," they all said in unison, and exchanged a look. ~ Rachel Caine

Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you. ~ Anita Shreve

It's hard navigating life in a leaky boat. Meet me on the water, Lord. ~ Crissy Shreve

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination? ~ Anita Shreve

I let go of my remorse...of wanting to fix his problems and cure his pain. This seems like such a common female thing, to lose oneself completely when trying to take care of others, but really, it is just another form of control, one that grants no faith in the other person and denies that they have the power and ability to help themselves. ~ Shreve Stockton

Are we, as we age, I wonder, repaid for all our thoughtless gestures ~ Anita Shreve

The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating. ~ Anita Shreve

To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden. ~ Anita Shreve

There are more experiences in life than you'd think for which there are no words. ~ Anita Shreve

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

Webster, as if he's done it every day of his life, as if he did it just the day before, trails his fingers from the small of Sheila's back to the nape of her neck.
Sheila turns her head, "Go slowly and be careful," she says. ~ Anita Shreve

With her children in the backyard, and her foot taped, Grace stands at the kitchen counter with a pencil and a pad of paper. She knows from long experience that sometimes a list is the only way from one side to the other. ~ Anita Shreve

Voltage crossed the distance between Sheila and Webster. A current composed of anger and remorse and something else-the last flicker of attraction ~ Anita Shreve

Her pace is furious as she walks along the beach, the surf competing with the noise in her head. ~ Anita Shreve

As a child, I was an observer, a listener for the stories of grown-ups. I led a quiet, solitary life with my mother, interrupted in the evenings by the arrival of my father who preferred to live in a state of emergency. ~ Susan Shreve

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

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

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

My mother taught me to knit when I was seven. I forgot about knitting until one day I saw Marion at the counter with hers and confessed that I knew how. Confessed is the right word. In those days, in the early 1980s, knitting was not a hobby a preteen would readily admit to. But Marion, every enthusiastic, pounced upon me and insisted that I show her something I'd made. I did
a misshapen scarf
which she priased exravagantly. she lent me a raspberry-colored wool for another project, a hat for myself. Since then I've been knitting pretty continuously. It's addictive and it's soothing, and fora a few minutes anyway, it makes me feel closer to my mother. ~ Anita Shreve

You reap what you sow. ~ Anita Shreve

My favourite books series as a young child was the Frank L. Baum 'Wizard of Oz' series. They were beautifully written, oversized fat books with wonderful type and illustrations. ~ Anita Shreve

To what extent does time distort memory> ~ Anita Shreve

It's so egotistical to believe that we know more about someone else's reality than they do, and such a waste of time. ~ Shreve Stockton

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

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

The warmth of him always, even on the coldest of nights, as though his inner furnace burned extravagantly. ~ Anita Shreve

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

I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers. ~ Anita Shreve

Between the head and the heart is the voice, and our voice reflects our choices: the way we reconcile what we think and what we feel; what we know and what we desire. Our voice reaches the world through the manner in which we live - sound is unnecessary; we show others who we are by the way we go through life, and touch everyone we meet with who we are in that moment. ~ Shreve Stockton

Something inside me squeezes up tight like a sponge that is being wrung out ~ Anita Shreve

She felt with the shiver the rare sensation that she was exactly where she should be. She was an idea, a memory, one perfect possibility out of an infinite number. ~ Anita Shreve

Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe. ~ Anita Shreve

I brought pictures to the inn, to show you who I'd been, but I saw at once my mistake, the hurt in your eyes, and you said, It hurts that I wasn't with you. ~ Anita Shreve

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist. ~ Anita Shreve

If you suspect a problem, there is a problem. Don't let them get away with even the very first lie. Be vigilant. ~ Anita Shreve

A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house. ~ Anita Shreve

It's a wonder any of us make it. ~ Anita Shreve

As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences. ~ Anita Shreve

I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough. ~ Anita Shreve

WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience. ~ Anita Shreve

What they want seems so simple-time together, a lifetime together, or what is left of a lifetime together-and yet that small goal, he knows, is fraught with endless complications: a maze of responsibilities and commitments, deceptions and betrayals. Why, why, why he asks himself silently for the hundredth time, couldn't they have remained somehow connected-in touch , with all that phrase implies-until they were old enough to find each other again? ~ Anita Shreve

I discover that it is possible to be angry with someone who has died. It is possible to hate yourself for being angry with someone who has died. It is possible to believe that you will die from grief, that somehow your breathing will catch itself up and simply stop. It is possible to believe that you could have stopped the terrible thing that happened at any time, if only you had known. ~ Anita Shreve

Love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people. ~ Anita Shreve

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

I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make. ~ Anita Shreve

Quentin did not answer, staring at the window; then he could not tell if it was the actual window or the window's pale rectangle upon his eyelids, though after a moment it began to emerge. It began to take shape in its same curious, light, gravity-defying attitude
the once-folded sheet out of the wistaria Mississippi summer, the cigar smell, the random blowing of the fireflies. "The South," Shreve said. "The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years." It was becoming quite distinct. He would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now.
"I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died," Quentin said. ~ William Faulkner

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. ~ William Faulkner

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

But after a while, that too passes, and she and Jack go back to normal, as they have been before, which is to say that they, like all the other couples Kathryn has ever known, live in a state of gentle decline, of being infinitesimally, but not agonizingly, less than they were the day before. ~ Anita Shreve

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

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

Reflections on Careers in Quantitative Finance

Carnegie Mellon's Steve Shreve is out with an interesting post on careers in quantitative finance, with his commentary on the changing landscape in quantitative research and the implications for financial education. ~ Paul Ellis

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature. ~ Anita Shreve

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

Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one. ~ Anita Shreve

It was probably not so unusual to be a different person with a different man, for all parts were authentically within, waiting to be coaxed out by one person or another ~ Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve is an author I adore. I rip through her meaty books and get off on the robust romance immensely - especially if I am feeling less than robust in my real life. ~ Isabel Gillies

Lord God, I confess that my son/daughter is loosed from all bondage - set free by the precious blood of Jesus. No past, present, or future bondage will ever prevail against ____________. The world, sin, deception, satanic enticements, the flesh, even fear of death - none of these things will ever be able to enslave this child who is dedicated to You. I pray that You will always be a deliverer, guardian, and guide to ____________, bringing him/her out of any weakness, darkness, or difficult situation of life. I pray that by Your mighty hand You will lead my child into the promised land of his/her destiny. You are the almighty God! There is nothing too hard for You! So I declare redemption over my offspring, believing it will come to pass. In the name of Jesus, amen (let it be so)! ~ Mike Shreve

In the late 1990s, I wrote a book from the point of view of a young black woman who has barricaded herself in her college dorm room, pursued by a man, either real or imagined, who finally materializes as the father she has never known. ~ Susan Shreve

The air is sharp, and I understand why years ago sea air was prescribed as a tonic for the body. ~ Anita Shreve

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

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

The lying started in the eighth grade. Possibly it had begun earlier, and I simply hadn't noticed. ~ Anita Shreve

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

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end. ~ Anita Shreve

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

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

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

A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go. ~ Anita Shreve

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

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

Bunches of flowers and kisses, their bodies locked together by a stopwatch.
Descriptive on an affair ~ Susan Richards Shreve

As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear. ~ Susan Shreve

I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor. ~ Anita Shreve

Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions - the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions ... ~ Anita Shreve

And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do. ~ Anita Shreve

Bees chase flowers. ~ Tracy L. Shreve

Lucy settled into August's kitchen as if they were a family. ~ Susan Richards Shreve

I have a Facebook page and a website. Beyond that, I'm actually a very private person. I'd rather see the focus on the books than on me. ~ Anita Shreve

Mirnin: Where's Shreve? ~ Rachel Caine

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love. ~ Anita Shreve

To leave, after all, was not the same as being left. ~ Anita Shreve

I worried constantly. I felt that my son was chipping away at me. This small thing and then that small thing. ~ 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

Good shoveling - and then I walk ~ Anita Shreve

Now. 1973. Exactly." He tipped back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. "So much changed in the sixties, the war, the rights of women, civil rights, the vote, protest against the war. On and on. I was getting my Ph.D. in Chicago and you were in college but that time was upheaval with a purpose. Now we've drawn back into our shells, wondering what we have done and what do we believe.? And is there any purpose to our lives? ~ Susan Richards Shreve