Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

she'd have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.

cell phone. He gave her more water, told her to drink it slowly, then began leading her back the way they had come; her legs were

Ela se lembrou do que era a esperança, e era isso. Aquela agitação interna que te impele, que faz você avançar pela vida como os barcos abaixo abrindo caminho pela água reluzente, como o avião avançando rumo a um lugar novo, onde precisavam dela.

Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately. Absolutely nuts. She was so mad at Jim O'Casey. She was so mad, she went into the woods and hit a tree hard enough to make her hand bleed. She cried down by the creek until she gagged.

reminder how some people could do things others could not.

the sight of him then broke my heart. But I was used to that feeling—I had it almost every time after I saw him.

Each of his sons had been his favorite child.

From the corner of his eye, he watched his sister; he thought she was a good driver. He liked her bulkiness, the way she filled her seat and drove with such authority. He wished he could tell her this; he wished he could say something more than that she was great. He finally said, 'Vicky, we didn't turn out so bad, you know.

He had died on his bed, the same bed that my father had died on many years earlier.

deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me.

there was nothing to explain what he felt was happening to him, that he'd been put into a transparent plastic capsule that rose off the ground and was tossed and blown and shaken so fiercely that he could not possibly find his way back to the quotidian pleasures of his past life. Desperately, he did not want this.

And she learned—freshly, scorchingly—of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn't. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, "You'll have another one.

But in Jim O'Casey there had been a wariness, a quiet anger, and she had seen herself in him, had said to him once, We're both cut from the same piece of bad cloth. He had just watched her, eating his apple.

praise seems unable to enter me.

They had never kissed, nor even touched, only passed by each other closely as they went into his office, a tiny cubicle off the library - they avoided the teachers' room. But after he said that that day, she lived with a kind of terror, and a longing that felt at times unendurable. But people endure things.

a thin white hand, a strip of poured milk in the dim light.

Pete's death. It felt to me as though my entire childhood had died. You might think—I would have thought—that I wanted every part of my childhood gone. But I did

She spoke mostly of her work with the ACLU, and I thought: She is not talking about anything real. And I think by that I mean that she was not talking about how she felt

way that was comfortable. Her house had been

She actually moved her neck back and forth as though to shake off the cumbersome weight of the sound, and realized that she had never liked music. It seemed to bring back all the shadows and aches of a lifetime.

Leer mala literatura es como comer comida basura

Pain, like a pinecone unfolding, seemed to blossom beneath her breastbone.

I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me. I feel invisible is what I mean.

after school and discovered Julie LaGuinn standing at the blackboard.