Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

Dottie was not a woman to complain, having been taught by her decent Aunt Edna one summer—it seemed like a hundred years ago, and practically was—that a complaining woman was like pushing dirt beneath the fingernails of God, and this was an image Dottie had never been able to fully dislodge.

What am I going to do, Bob? I have no family." "You have family," Bob said. "You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family.

say—every morning he said this—"Lucy B, Lucy B, how did we meet? I thank God we

Er was iets aan haar wat ten diepste -bijna wezenlijk- in harmonie was met zichzelf, zoals iemand is, denk ik, wanneer allebei zijn ouders van hem hebben gehouden.

We want the news that is kept secret, the unsayable things that occur in the dark crevices of the mind on a night when insomnia visits. We want to know, I think, what it is like to be another person, because somehow this helps us position our own self in the world.

At night I started once again to wake while it was still dark, and I would lie there and think about my life, and I could make no sense of it. It seemed to come to me in fragments

Well, this, and this, and this have happened. It would not be accurate as told. She thought nothing could be told and be accurate. Feeble words dropped earnestly and haphazardly over the large stretched-out fabric of a life with all its knots and bumps— What words would she use to spread her experience before him?

It was Henry's nature to listen, and many times during the week he would say, 'Gosh, I'm awful sorry to hear that, ' or 'Say, isn't that something?

She had recently, though, had fantasies of what they called "going normal.

I thought of how my life had become so different from what I had ever imagined for myself during these—my last—years.

The disabilities of the people who came to him were established so young, in such delicate years, that their tender agonies were, by the time they arrived in his office, thickened into a stunned arrangement of expressions, deflections, and shrewd manipulations. No

Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do

Verdriet is zoiets- o, het is zoiets éénzaams; dat is het beangstigende ervan, denk ik. Het is alsof je langs de glaswand van een heel hoog gebouw naar beneden glijdt terwijl niemand je ziet.

This is how we lived. It was strange.

And what I most remember was that this guy told us that—because we are in the middle of it—we will not live long enough to see how it plays out in this world.

a vida acelerava e, de repente, a maior parte já tinha passado;

True authenticity, I'd decided, required an absolute, nearly spiritual denial of the audience, or even of the possibility of being watched; but here, something true, something real, had quickly morphed into something fake.

I stood for a moment, watching them drive away. I thought how different they—and their lives—had become from what I had expected. And I thought: It is their life, they can do what they want, or need to do.

Work gets done if you simply do it.

What she could not possibly have known was that even as I stood before all those people and read and answered questions, I still felt oddly—but very truly—invisible.

It was to be taken seriously, Olive saw this. All love was to be taken seriously, including her own brief love for her doctor. But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much. Olive finally said, leaning forward in her chair, "Here's what I think, young lady. I think you're doin' excellent." Then she sat back. What a thing love was. Olive felt it for Betty, even with that bumper sticker on her truck.

What I am trying to say is that for a few minutes I had what almost felt like a vision: that there was deep, deep unrest in the country and that the whisperings of a civil war seemed to move around me like a breeze I could not quite feel but could sense. We got our ice cream and we left, and I told William what I had felt and he said, "I know.

Lucy. You deal with everything.

It was terrible, though, when you couldn't tell people things. Olive felt this keenly as the days went by.