Anita Shreve citations

“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.”

“To leave, after all, was not the same as being left.”

“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.”

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

“Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.”

“There are more experiences in life than you’d think for which there are no words.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.”

“A single action can cause a life to veer off in a direction it was never meant to go.”

“But how do you ever know that you know a person?”

“I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.”

“the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.”