Anita Shreve Quotes

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

My feelings can perhaps be imagined, but they can hardly be described.

My family life, my adoption - it could be related to the songs, but I think the songs are deeper than that. They're not just about this experience.

My heart is full of many things there are moments when I feel that speech is nothing after all.

Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy

Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad? Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people.

The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.

During the course of a day, some dark feeling comes, maybe some sadness comes, some thrill, some great happiness, some strange humor. Cinema can embrace all that in one story, just as the story of life.

I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

Some events are in the area of the soul where words cannot penetrate.

I can’t help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes.

I think I must be worried all the time - maybe that is the other side of joy, you know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.

Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.

Pop music, which I deeply admire and wish I could play better than I can, is based on expressing one mood, one feeling at a time. Classical music is by its very nature involved with different kinds of music, constantly transforming one another, which is more akin to the way our experience of life really is.

It's the idea of baggage. When you hear about people in their 40s boast about not having baggage. I think having no baggage is your baggage. That means that you haven't thrown yourself into the mess of life.

Life can be very funny and very tragic. Everyone has stuff that they've been through that makes up whatever fire it is that they have in their gut, but nobody goes around wearing that as their outmost exterior, all the time.

You are never angry for the reason you think you are. There's an older hurt under that.

Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.

A good writer - and I think it's this way with actors too - even if you have two lines, you have to do the same complete work as if you're number one on the call sheet. If you get in an elevator and somebody gets on, rides two floors and gets off, that person has a reality that goes back to when they were born. They have memories, they have people, they have a life. They are doing something right now that the camera is on them in their space. We live in our own close-up all the time.

I've done a number of films. I've been around this. I think the biggest challenge is just getting the script right, the way that you want the script to be. It's really about capturing the complexity of emotions and creating the kind of characters that people will want to watch every week.

Every human feeling is greater and larger than its exciting cause-a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence.

I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.

And then I think we realized, like any young guys, that blues are not learned in a monastery. You've got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back and then you can sing the blues.