All He Ever Wanted Quotes

“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, All He Ever Wanted

“I wanted to lay down my cloak so that her feet might not be sullied by the dirty snow, but of course I could not - not only for the seeming excess of the gesture, which might have frightened away any sane woman, but also for a D shear impracticality of doing so at continuous intervals.”
― Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted

“I hate exaggeration in any man.”
― Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted

“Possibly I was growing ill. One heard of various hysterias in women, of course, but one did not like to think such a state could infect a man; indeed, by definition, an hysteria could not infect a man, being an entirely female condition.”
― Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted

“Mrs. Hazzard chided me gently about my pomposity (which I fear has grown only more pronounced as the years have passed), once stopping me when I used the word heretofore. “Heretofore, Mr. Van Tassel?” she asked. And while heretofore may not be a particularly defensible word, I did argue that as a professor of English Literature, one had to decry the more simple (and, to my ear, bereft) speech of today’s discourse, since it constricted one’s vocabulary and did not allow one to parse the moment—dissect the moment, as it were—with clause upon clause upon clause (boxes within boxes within boxes, I so often think). She mulled this over a bit and then said she enjoyed speaking with me nevertheless, and that she found me charmingly amusing.”
― Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted

“We are passing now the mill towns of Holyoke and Chicopee in Massachusetts, blights upon the New England landscape”
― Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted

“Though she must have moved, to open the door and so forth, there was again such a quality of stillness that one felt recklessly drawn to her as one who traverses a cliff occasionally feels perilously like throwing oneself over the edge.”
― Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted

“And just that slight pressure, of which the woman beside me was doubtless completely unaware, was, I believe, the most intensely physical moment of my life to date—so much so that I can re-create its delicate promise and, yes, its eroticism merely by closing my eyes here in my moving compartment, even with all that came after, all that might reasonably have blotted out such a tender memory.”
― Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted

“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, All He Ever Wanted