Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

Please try to understand this: 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. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say—oh, I don't know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world.

It hurt my heart with a heaviness as though a damp and dirty dishcloth lay across it.

It's odd how the mind does not take in anything until it can.

I think there is no perfect way to live

He was watching her, leaning back in the chair with his arms crossed. His face was serious and kind; she saw he wasn't making fun. He spoke softly, his head bent forward with concern. "A woman should learn to take a compliment gracefully," he said.

I had often thought before: that there had been a last time—when they were little—that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say "Oh, honey, you're getting too big to be picked up" or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.

There were these times, is what I am saying, where the people I met were interesting. And their stories interwove!

But I thought: So it wasn't me that made him do this, if he did this while married to Joanne and also to Estelle? Then it wasn't because of me?

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.

It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author

How is it that some people know how to do this, and others, like me, still give off the faint smell of what we came from? I would like to know. I will never know. Catherine, with her own scent that she always wore.

Anita's face got blank, like she couldn't find the expression to put on it.

there is a cultural blank spot that never ever leaves, only it is not a spot, it is a huge blank canvas and it makes life very frightening.

Il silenzio, là dove avevano riecheggiato per tanti anni il suono della voce di Pam, le sue chiacchiere, le risate, le opinioni taglienti, gli improvvisi scoppi di pianto. L'assenza di tutto questo, il silenzio di una doccia che non scorreva, di cassetti che non si aprivano, perfino il silenzio di se stesso, che quando rientrava in casa non parlava, non raccontava a nessuno la sua giornata. Quel silenzio quasi lo uccideva.

My mother, because she was my mother, had great gravity in my young life. In my whole life. I did not know who she was, and I did not like who she had been. But she was my mother, and so some part of me had continued to believe things she had said.

oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose

Ed era troppo tardi. Nessuno vuole mai credere che sia troppo tardi, ma lo sta sempre diventando. E poi lo è.

Grown men with hurt feelings are transparent creatures; grown men who feel dimly they have done something wrong are positively opaque.

he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.

La parete era interamente occupata da uno specchio alto e gigantesco. Susan fu costretta a vedere se stessa: una donna dalla faccia pallida e dai capelli grigi, dai calzoni neri cascanti. Al contrario, Helen allo specchio sembrava piccola, compatta, linda e ordinata, con addosso un vestito di maglia aderente e un paio di collant: dove aveva imparato a vestirsi così?

Pam era convinta che fosse impossibile raccontare qualcosa in maniera fedele. Fragili parole sincere cadevano a casaccio sopra l'ampia distesa del tessuto di una vita, con tutti i suoi nodi e irregolarità.

To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active

And living with this pandemic was like that. You did not know.

And thinking of this now made me think of something I had often thought before: that there had been a last time - when they were little - that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say "Oh honey, you're getting too big to be picked up" or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.