Anita Shreve

“And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.”

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

“Poverty, her mother has written, makes you clever, and Honora knows that this is true.”

“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.”

“The view, though. The view. It is undeniably exhilarating.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I love working alone. Crave it, in fact. I feel truly alive then.”

“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.”

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

“Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.”

“I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.”

“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 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.”

“Everyday, there are choices to make and sometimes you make a selfish one.”

“You have to do what your heart dictates," Vivian says. "Do you believe that?""Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart?”

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

“Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.”

“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.”