Anita Shreve Quotes

I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.

One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.

Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Old cookbooks connect you to your past and explain the history of the world.

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.

As a kid I collected stamps, pebbles on the beach, anything. I liked to have at least 10 of something.

When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. They're covered in sand. They're difficult to see.

I do like silver. I love antiques. I collect Georgian glass at home. When you think about how fragile that it is and think about how long these things have lasted - some of it is 400 years old - I find the history of these things extraordinary.

[Addressing Thomas Jefferson:] Your taste is judicious in liking better the dreams of the future than the history of the past.

I'm still obsessed with the beach whenever I'm home; when I'm on the beach, it feels like home to me.

I'm kind of like one of those people that picks up small and interesting bits of wood and doesn't want to let go of them. Or, you know, I'm fascinated with the wrapper on a sardine can. A little cuckoo.

I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.

On Sunday, something washed up on shore.

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

I was 14 when the wall came down, so I only ever knew about the GDR or experienced it as a kid. I lived very far away from it, and you only ever thought about the GDR when you saw the Olympics, because you were like, "How are they always winning?!"

Pretending the past doesn't exist is as bad as living in it.

I'm glad the Cube is reaching new generations, who face it with fresh wonder, curiosity and enthusiasm.

The '70's came and went already

You hardly know me. Why do you want me to come with you?’ ‘Who knows? Perhaps you remind me just a bit of -‘ ‘Someone you used to know?’ Alec interjected skeptically. ‘Someone I used to be.

I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

I love comic books. Since I was a kid, I've collected them.

Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.