Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

she seemed caught between the pincers of some intractable remorse.

For the first time in years he thought about God, who seemed a piggy bank Harmon had stuck up on a shelf and had now brought down to look at with a new considering eye

Awful to think she was a disapproving mother. Awful to wonder—had she always frightened Amy? Is that why the girl had grown up so fearful, always ducking her head? It was bewildering to Isabelle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious. But it was a terrible feeling.

bodies becoming like prisons with the person stuck inside. Screaming, or not screaming, but staring at you like you should do something.

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable. Dottie

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

they had joked about that - how the girl had no idea, as the plunked down their mugs of coffee, that her own arm would someday be sprinkled with age spots, or that cups of coffee had to be planned since blood pressure medicine made you widdle so much, that life picked up speed, and then most of it was gone - made you breathless, really.

What we do matters is a thought Isabelle had again and again, as though just now, well into adult years, she was figuring this out.

He said slowly, "Bobby Burgess." There was a faint smile to his mouth. "King of the profound.

There was nothing different about the story – except that it was his.

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. And that's what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.

So much of life seems speculation.

If you can't figure out something... don't watch what you think, watch what you do.

Do I understand that hurt my children feel? I think I do, though they might claim otherwise. But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.

Stop smelling me," she said to him.

They're not crazy. They're exhausted. And partly they're exhausted by people like you reading about the most inflammatory aspects of their culture in some book club, and then getting to hate them for it, because deep down that's what we ignorant, weenie Americans, ever since the towers went down, really want to do. Have permission to hate them.

Long ago he'd assigned a private name to it. The hit-thumb theory. on his grandfather's rood 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.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did.

People live with things," Bernie said. "They do. I am always amazed at what people live with.

A friend had said to me once, 'Whenever I don't know what to do, I watch what I am doing.

She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son's life.

These words rolled over Suzanne with a swiftness, as though something true had been said but she couldn't catch it.

The privacy of sorrow.

we choose gifts that we ourselves love. The