Quotes from Anita Shreve

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

My favourite books series as a young child was the Frank L. Baum 'Wizard of Oz' series. They were beautifully written, oversized fat books with wonderful type and illustrations.

Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe.

I have spent many hours on the beach collecting sea glass, and I almost always wonder, as I bend to pick up chunk of bottle green or a shard of meringue white, what the history of the glass was. Who used it? Was it a medicine bottle? A bit of a ship's lantern? Is that bubbled piece of glass with the charred bits inside it from a fire?

A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.

I can think of no other experience quite like that of being 20 or so pages into a book and realizing that this is the real thing: a book that is going to offer the delicious promise of a riveting story, arresting language and characters that will haunt me for days.

I start writing at 7.30 A.M. and write till noon. I've never written a single word after 5.00 P.M.

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.

Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.

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.

love is ... something extraordinary that happens to ordinary people.

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

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

WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience.

Love and marriage are wonderful arenas in which to place a character. We are most likely to risk our morals and beliefs while in love. Betrayal gives tremendous insights into a character as well.

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

To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.