I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand telling.

— 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 to observe even as it conceals depths and current below.

— 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

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

Olympia often thinks 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

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

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

Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honor knows that this is true.

— 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

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