Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

Whatever we call it, I think it's the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.

When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. That astonishment had to do with death, with the wiping out of a person, with the puzzlement that the man was simply gone.

I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered. I don't know what my mother remembered either.

People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

he was an old man who was talking to himself on a wharf in Portland, Maine, and he could not—Jack Kennison, with his two PhDs—he could not figure out how this had happened.

She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.

the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me.

But never mind, Olive thinks now. You move aside and make way for the new.

and they undoubtedly think that will last, the way new couples do. They think they're finished with loneliness, too.

They say that's what happens as you get older. You think about the things of your youth.

The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.

guess many of us have regrets, he wrote, but my regrets seem to grow as I get older.

She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son's life. But

I have never seen anything as beautiful as those girls. These women. My daughters!

The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had—their inner selves brushing up against the other.

Rebecca, standing at the window, felt a tiny smile inside her getting larger - how delicious it would be: one moment of perfect joy, propped up and righteous with booze, to let that first punch fly.

It was the tall white windmills that came to her mind. How their skinny long arms all turned, but never together, except for just once in a while two of them would be turning in unison, their arms poised at the same place in the sky.

Women grieve, and men replace.

The United States is a country of laws and not men and that we will provide safety to those who come to us for safety.")

Mensen zijn eenzaam, dat wil ik hier maar mee zeggen. Veel mensen kunnen niet tegen degenen die ze goed kennen zeggen wat ze misschien wel zouden willen zeggen.

Copper è venuto da me in sogno ieri notte. Non sembrava proprio un sogno. Potrei giurare che è venuto davvero da... be', da ovunque si trovi adesso, per farmi una visita». Chinò la testa verso di lui, sbirciandolo attraverso il fumo. «Ti sembra pazzesco?». Harmon alzò una spalla. «Non capisco come facciano gli altri ad avere informazioni riservate su certe cose, non importa quello in cui dichiarano di credere, o di non credere».

People always kept moving, her mother had said, it's the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced—but moving.

Dio mio», aveva aggiunto Bunny, soffiandosi il naso. «A volte mi sembra di non poter mai vincere». «Non puoi vincere», aveva risposto Henry. «Puoi solo fare del tuo meglio».

An ache stayed inside her. And a faint reverberating hum of something close to joy lived on the outer edges of her memory, some kind of longing that had been answered once and was simply not answered anymore.