Anita Shreve
Anita Shreve
Anita Shreveis an American writer. The daughter of an airline pilot and a homemaker, she graduated from Dedham High School in Massachusetts, attended Tufts University and began writing while working as a high school teacher in Reading, MA. One of her first published stories, Past the Island, Drifting,was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1976...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
imagination dependent
Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?
blood air body
And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.
two people long
Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.
sea rocks desire
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.
age base dozens entire lives novelist stories suppose weave
A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.
almost certain comforts death edwardian entire face generation innocence left life men novel romantic senses shattered travel women
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.
almost bend bit bits bottle chunk collecting glass green history hours inside medicine pick piece spent
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?
interested notion remain
As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences.
good revise until written
I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.
books facebook private rather
I have a Facebook page and a website. Beyond that, I'm actually a very private person. I'd rather see the focus on the books than on me.
floating four ideas moment novel produce single three time
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.
books bug corner hit near remember via
I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.
alone crave love truly
I love working alone. Crave it, in fact. I feel truly alive then.
history life pull theme
The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.