Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

it was new, what he saw on the Internet, the cool statements of superiority so deeply believed in, that anyone not white should, as one person had written, "be exterminated as easily as we do rats." Gerry didn't share with his wife the things he read. "Cowards," he did say. "You can be anonymous, that's what's the trouble with the Internet." Each night now Gerry took a sleeping pill.

But it's never starting over, Cindy, it's just continuing on.

Here is what I did not know that morning in March: I did not know that I would never see my apartment again. I did not know that one of my friends and a family member would die of this virus. I did not know that my relationship with my daughters would change in ways I could never have anticipated. I did not know that my entire life would become something new.

The leaves were half-gone now. The Norway maples still hung on to their yellow, but most of the orangey-red of the sugar maples had found their way to the ground, leaving behind the stark branches that seemed to hang like stuck-out arms and tiny fingers, skeletal and bleak.

How can people in California have problems with their feet?" asks Molly moving around Olive with a plate of sandwiches. "Don't they drive everywhere?

Sarah Payne said, If there is a weakness in your story, address it head-on, take it in your teeth and address it, before the reader really knows. This is where you will get your authority, she said, during one of those classes when her face was filled with fatigue from teaching. I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you. I feel that people may not understand: It was all right.

I would give it all up, all the success I have had as a writer, all of it I would give up—in a heartbeat I would give it up—for a family that was together and children who knew they were dearly loved by both their parents who had stayed together and who loved each other too.

But the mind, or the heart, she didn't know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn't get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it.

he had been drawn to psychiatry, in spite of his recognition that those who became psychiatrists did so as a result of their own messed-up childhoods, always looking, looking, looking for the answer in the writings of Freud, Horney, Reich, of why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were, and yet at the same time denying it, of course

who would mark a sweater, steal a bra, take one shoe?

But I have often thought that it made me a nicer person, I really do. When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, this is what I think.

My childhood had been a lockdown.

Her grandmother said, "Don't come back. Don't get married. Don't have children. All those things will bring you heartache

Não gostava de estar sozinha. Mas gostava ainda menos de estar com gente.

I know faintly, even now, that I have embarrassed myself, and it always comes back to the feeling of childhood, that huge pieces of knowledge about the world were missing that can never be replaced.

Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually.

lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.

for Angie time was as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense out of it was like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean was deep.

When Chrissie left for college, then Becka the next year, I thought—and it's not an expression, I'm saying the truth—I did think I would die.

At times these days—rarely, very rarely, but at times—I feel like I've become, oh, just a tiny—tiny—bit better as a person, and it makes me sick that Henry didn't get any of that from me.

Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.

She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far. The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago.

There was for me during this time a sense of being dazed. As though, in a way, I was not capable of taking in everything that was happening in this world.

He thought of all the people in the world who felt they'd been saved by a city. He was one of them. Whatever darkness leaked its way in, there were always lights on in different windows here, each light like a gentle touch on his shoulder saying, Whatever is happening, Bob Burgess, you are never alone.