Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

a noted academic had said at a lecture last year. The dawning of a new age. There was always a new age dawning.

And he said, "Lucy. You deal with everything.

William's life rumbled over, like a train on loose tracks: the images from Dachau that would not leave his brain after he had gone there with me so many years ago. He had been petrified by what he saw there in Germany. He must have been

tulip stem inside me snapped. This is what I felt. It has stayed snapped, it never grew back.

could not believe that I was sitting in the sky, and I had to act nonchalant about it, and I tried to. But it was astonishing.

Unspeakably frightened. It had unmoored him.

God, I'm scared,' he said, quietly. She almost said, 'Oh, stop. I hate scared people.

invisible and yet having a spotlight on

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic—you were made to feel guilty about everything.

Driving, Lambright thought the moon looked like a fingerprint of chalk.

Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can't stand the blah-blah-blah. And they'd just as soon blah-blah-blah about you when your back is turned.

What a strange thing life is.

Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately.

told me my presence is what he found to be the greatest comfort and so he would fall back to sleep.

am not going to say anything more about this. But I loved him, my father. I did.

we kind of know who we are, without knowing it.

the young, he thought, could withstand the rigors of love.

Fine, make beds, but find a way to keep using your head.

What is it that William knew about me and that I knew about him that caused us to get married?

Christopher had married his receptionist, he'd still be here in town. Although the girl had been stupid. Olive could see why he'd passed on her. His wife was not stupid. She was pushy and determined, and mean as a bat from hell.

She thought how she had passed by him when he'd asked for a hug, how she had seen her mother do that to him, too, only sometimes Anita would touch his shoulders and kiss the air beside his cheek. Maybe Julie was right

after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

She wanted to be dead and she wanted her daughter to be dead too so that neither of them would have to face the unbearable business of continuing on. It

But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—