Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

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.

And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone. —

You've been through a great deal," his mother conceded. "But the back strengthens to the burdens it has to bear, and I'd like to see a little more backbone in you.

but it was the doctor's body, the sudden way he moved the folders on his desk, the way he moved back from Harmon, that Harmon would always remember. As though he had known what Harmon didn't know, that lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.

We are alone in these things that we suffer.

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.

Olive glanced at him quickly. He was crying. She looked away, and from the corner of her eye, she saw him reach into his pocket, heard him blow his nose, a real honk. "My wife died in December," he said. Olive watched the river. "Then, you're in hell," she said. "Then, I'm in hell.

And—I know the defensiveness in this sentence—my parents and my sister and my brother never wrote me, or called me, and when I called them it was always hard; I felt I heard in their voices anger, a habitual resentment, as though they were silently saying You are not one of us, as though I had betrayed them by leaving them.

thought of the ants that were still going about trying to get their sand wherever they needed it to go. They seemed almost heartbreaking to him, in their tininess and their resilience.

There was an old African proverb Dottie had read one day that said, "After a man eats, he becomes shy." And Dottie thought of that now with Shelly. Shelly was like the man in the proverb; having satisfied her needs, she was ashamed. She had confided more than she had wanted to, and now Dottie was somehow to blame.

You can become bigger or bitter, this is what I think. And as a result of that pain, I became bigger.

He hated dishonesty-- or lack of courage-- more than anything.

People like to think the younger generation's job is to steer the world to hell. But it's never true, is it? They're hopeful and good—and that's how it should be.

Her irritation with the world had dampened into a cushion of soft melancholy that went with her everywhere.

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—what bullshit he had witnessed among his colleagues, his professors!

She did not say, and only fleetingly did she think: And you have always taken up so much space in my heart that it has sometimes felt to be a burden.)

People either didn't know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.

A little bit she was aware of the beauty she walked by, the sunlight sparkling off the quiet lake, the bare trees - it was beautiful, she was not unaware of this, but it was futile, and far away. Mostly she looked down at the muddy roots in front of her; the path, uneven with its little use, required concentration to maneuver. Perhaps it was the concentration that allowed her into the day.

But the news reporters had no wish, perhaps no ability, to understand that the fishermen's coastline had been spoiled with toxic waste, that they could not fish as they once had—Americans really did not understand desperation. It was easier, and certainly more pleasing, to view the Gulf of Aden as a lawless place where Somali pirates reigned. A crazy parent, America was. Good and openhearted one way, dismissive and cruel in others.

A Republican, then?" Jack asked, after a moment. "Oh, for God's sake." Olive stopped walking, looked at him through her sunglasses. "I didn't say moron. You mean because we have a cowboy for a president? Or before that an actor who played a cowboy? Let me tell you, that idiot ex-cocaine-addict was never a cowboy. He can wear all the cowboy hats he wants. He's a spoiled brat to the manor born. And he makes me puke.

When other helpers fail and comforts flee . . . O Lord, abide with me.

This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly.

He had a friend. He would have said this if he could, he would have said it, but there was no need: Like his sweet Sophia who loved her Snowball, Abel had a friend. And if such a gift could come to him at such a time, then anything-dear girl from Rockford dressed up for her meeting, rushing above the Rock River-he opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything was possible for anyone.