Fortune's Rocks Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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, Fortune's Rocks

“It is time that determines the intensity of love.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“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, Fortune's Rocks

“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, Fortune's Rocks

“... 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

“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

“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, Fortune's Rocks

“Albertine Bolduc has passed”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“And it seems a most elemental gesture—to take a child from a man.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“and it seems, as it always does, a most elemental gesture, to take a child from a man.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“And it is only then, with the crowd behind her and all her life before her, that she truly understands what she was meant to have known from the very beginning. He is not hers. He was never hers.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“one’s ability to believe in the notion that two souls which stir in the universe may be destined to meet and may be meant only for each other?”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“While she sits at the dining table, or writes letters on the porch, or reads to her mother in her room, Olympia invents dialogue and debate with Haskell and weaves amusing anecdotes for him around the most seemingly banal events of her daily life. In truth, her normal routines appear now to exist solely for the purpose of self-revelation, of revealing herself to a man she hardly knows. But though she repeats the same conversations and scenes over and over in her mind, she cannot exhaust them....Even so, she tortures herself with her endless imaginings, and there is no hour in which Haskell does not dominate her thoughts.”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“should be paid to the unlikelihood of”
― Anita Shreve, Fortune's Rocks

“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, Fortune's Rocks

“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, Fortune's Rocks

“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, Fortune's Rocks