Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

Earlier in their marriage, they'd had fights that had made Olive feel sick the way she felt now. But 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.

I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person.

Sometimes I thought I would die from the pain of our separating, and the pain it caused my girls, but I did not die, and I am here, and so is William.

We talked about our girls and we both thought they would be all right; they were already all right but when you have children you worry about them forever

On the "hit-thumb theory" : "On his grandfather's roof as a child one summer, hammering tiles down hard, he'd discovered that if you hammered your thumb by mistake, there was a split second when you thought: Hey, this isn't so bad, considering how hard I was hit… And then—after that moment of false, bewildered, and grateful relief—came the crash and crush of real pain.

The idea that there might be an afterlife horrified Connie. She had a hard enough time with this one. What if death was a big garbage bag where the body went, but the mind was left to hang on forever, suspended with its thoughts? That was Connie's idea of hell.

Bonnie was the central heating of his life." pg. 83

why they were the anal, narcissistic, self-absorbed freaks that they were

William had felt alone in the world. And now he had a sister. Inside myself I wept. From happiness and sadness both.

I did not feel that I mattered.

As a matter of fact, I could argue that none of us has a center of gravity. That we're tugged and pulled by competing forces every minute and we hold on as best we can.

And how nice, really, that people should celebrate with such earnestness this time of year. No matter what people's lives might hold (some of these houses they were passing would have to hold some woeful tribulations, Janie knew), still and all, people were compelled to celebrate because they knew somehow, in their different ways, that life was a thing to celebrate.

I got on the train, and what I remember is watching New Jersey as the sun came up, and feeling so grateful for my home, so deeply, deeply grateful to be going home to New York, to my home with my husband and my girls. I will never forget it. I loved them all that much—oh desperately I loved them. So there was that as well.

Helen worked in her back garden, planting her tulip and crocus bulbs. Her irritation with the world had dampened into a cushion of soft melancholy that went with her everywhere.

But we are all mythologies

He understood that he was a seventy-four-year-old man who looks back at life and marvels that it unfolded as it did, who feels unbearable regret for all the mistakes made.

felt a sense of dismalness.

Pam's determination was almost always stronger than her disappointments

Everything felt a little bit far away, is what I mean, like I was removed from it. And that night in the hotel I did not give myself as freely to my husband as I usually did, the feeling I had was still with me. The truth is this: That feeling never went away. Not entirely. I had it my whole marriage with him—it ebbed and flowed—but it was a terrible thing.

we all love imperfectly.

I could not believe how Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: "How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

And there seemed nothing to be done about it. And nothing was done about it. Because I could not speak of it and William became less happy and he closed down in small ways, I could see that happen. And we lived our lives on top of this.

I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker.

The hit-thumb theory.