Anita Shreve Quotes

It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.

Love is the hardest habit to break, and the most difficult to satisfy.

Romantic love is painful.

Love is a wonderful thing that one misses.

How unbelievably naive we both were that night. We clung hard to each other, making vows we couldn't keep and should never have spoken aloud. That's how love is sometimes. I already loved him more than I'd ever loved anything or anyone. I knew he needed me absolutely, and I wanted him to go on needing me forever.

Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?

She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn't think of him -- didn't speak to him in her head, didn't relive every moment they'd been together, didn't long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.

To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.

I have tried to let you go and I cannot. I cannot stop thinking of you. I cannot stop dreaming about you.

I know it makes sense for me and him to just break up now and just live our seperate lives and not have to worry about missing each other all the time. But when I think about that, I get sick. Physically sick. Like I seriously throw up. I need to be with him, even if I can’t, like, be with him.

Once, when I was young and true. Someone left me sad - Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.

The truth is... I gave my heart away a long time ago, my whole heart... and I never really got it back.

I had never thought I could love another person this much. I also never thought I’d live in such fear of losing another person. Was this how everyone in love felt? Did they all cling tightly to their beloved and wake up terrified in the middle of the night, afraid of being alone? Was that an inevitable way of life when you loved so deeply? Or was it just those of us who walked on a precipice who lived in such panic?

For me, a place unvisited is like an unrequited love. A dull ache that- try as you might to think it away, to convince yourself that she really wasn't the right country for you- just won't leave you in peace.

The love we most cherish will, of necessity, bring us pain. Because that love is like the setting of a body with broken bones. But I want to stage the setting. I want to direct all scenes.

It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again — nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing.

I miss him as soon as he goes. When he isn't with me, I think I made him up.

I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.

Love is a disease no one wants to get rid of. Those who catch it never try to get better, and those who suffer do not wish to be cured.

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can’t bear to think that he might love somebody else.

Park was never going to love her more than he did on the day they said goodbye. And she couldn’t bear to think of him loving her less.