Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

The truth is, Bob, they need those immigrants. Maine's been losing its young people—you and I are a perfect case in point. And the truth also is: That's sad.

Spense la sigaretta nel portacenere. Non si sarebbe messa a lamentarsi, non era più una bambina. Ma le restava dentro un dolore. E un suono continuo e sommesso, il debole riverbero qualcosa di simile alla gioia, continuava a vivere ai margini della sua memoria, una qualche specie di desiderio che un tempo aveva trovato risposta e ora, semplicemente, non più.

As though he had known what Harmon didn't know, that lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.

sometimes just feel sorry for everyone in this whole wide world?" And

Who's going to take care of all those old white people? Where are new businesses going to come from?" Bob

This is the sea! It was like a foreign country to me. Except, in truth, foreign places always frighten me. I like places that are familiar.

A yearning stirred in him that was not sexual but a kind of reaching toward her simplicity of form. He

It seemed the older he grew - and he had grown old - the more he understood that he could not understand this confusing contest between good and evil, and that maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth.

It had made me draw back just slightly inside myself. And I knew this was because I had always been afraid of giving off that odor myself.

This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don't know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.

naming things can be helpful.

You could buy a snow blower or a nice wool dress for your wife, but beneath it all people were rats scurrying off to find garbage to eat, another rat to hump, making a nest in broken bricks, and soiling it so sourly that one's contribution to the world was only more excrement.

hate her. Joanne. I hate her.

when they both asked me "Is he going to be okay?" I said he would most certainly be okay. I emphasized this, because I did not know myself—except what choice did he have, what choice do most of us have, except to be okay?

did not feel that I mattered. Because in a way I have never been able to feel that. And so the days were hard.

It has been said that the second year of widowhood is worse than the first—the idea being, I think, that the shock has worn off and now one has to simply live with the loss, and I had been finding that to be

this huge, sprawling place had taken me in—had let me live there. This is what I feel almost every time I see it from the sky. I felt

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.

I have never fully understood the whole class business in America, though, because I came from the very bottom of it, and when that happens it never really leaves you. I mean I have never really gotten over it, my beginnings, the poverty, I guess is what I mean.

it was an unspeakably awful thing. And I had not known. This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.

and then I would think about when the girls were little, but they were somehow not always happy memories for me, because I seemed only to remember how William had been cheating on me for so many years during that time, and so what I might otherwise have thought of as a good memory was not one.

Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves. Except Sibby had been interested in her, and she had been terribly interested in him. This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.

boys. Defense attorneys for the whole crappy world." Bob's new apartment

Why is ink like a fire? Because it is a good servant and a hard master.