"There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words."
— 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 (Fortune's Rocks: A Novel)

"I thought about how one tiny decision can change a life. A decision that takes only a split second to make."
— Anita Shreve (Light on Snow)

""the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.""
— Anita Shreve (The Last Time They Met)

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

"In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune's Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire. "
— Anita Shreve (Fortune's Rocks: A Novel)

"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

"To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden."
— Anita Shreve (The Pilot's Wife)

"“There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.”"
— 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 (Fortune's Rocks: A Novel)

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

"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

"If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance."
— Anita Shreve (Where or When)

"Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping."
— Anita Shreve (The Pilot's Wife)

"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 (The Weight of Water)

"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..."
— 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 (Fortune's Rocks: A Novel)

"... she suddenly looks different to Olympia, physically different, as though a portrait has been alterred. And Olympia thinks that possibly such adjustments might have to be made for everyone she knows. Upon meeting a person, a sketch is formed, and for the life of the relationship, however intimate or not, a portrait is painted, with oils or pastels or with black ink or with watercolor, and only at a persons's death can the portraits be considered finished. Perhaps not even at the person's death."
— Anita Shreve (Fortune's Rocks: A Novel)

"The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating."
— Anita Shreve

"She noticed this time that his eyes weren't really gray, but green, and that perhaps they were set too close together. His forehead was awfully high, and when he smiled, his teeth were slightly crooked. And there was something cocky in his manner, but that might just be the salesman in him, she thought. Honora laid these flaws aside as one might overlook a small stain on a beautifully embroidered tablecloth one wanted to buy, only later to discover, when it was on the table and all the guests were seated around it, that the stain had become a beacon, while the beautiful embroidery lay hidden in everybody's laps."
— 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

"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

"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 (Body Surfing: A Novel)