Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

Haweeya had never been able to figure out exactly what Americans wanted. (Everything, she sometimes thought. They wanted everything.)

You're in the middle of a storm at the moment.

will always—oh, always!—I will always love that woman.

He had felt the presence of God since, at times, as though a golden color was very near to him, but he never again felt visited by God as he had felt that night, and he knew too well what people would make of it, and this is why he would keep it to himself until his dying day—the sign from God.

they chose never to say how they really felt about something.

she was glad to see all the butter he used. It was his love for butter she was counting on, hoping that would do him in.

They had somehow taken a group of women from the town through the (concentration) camps to show them what had been right there, and Tommy's brother said that although some of the women wept, some of them put their chins up, and looked angry, as if they refused to be made to feel bad.

William is the only person I ever felt safe with. He is the only home I ever had.

Because two people can't have entirely different opinions without one of them being final.

He took down the curtains that hung in front of the blinds and washed them in the old washing machine. In his mind they were blue-gray curtains, but it turned out that they were off-white. He washed them a second time, and they were an even brighter off-white.

She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed.

And he could not believe it. He really could not believe it. It was not unlike falling off his bicycle so many years ago when he was a child, the slow sense of something terrible happening, and the knowledge that there was nothing he could do about it. Watching the pavement come up to meet his cheek.

people, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side

you don't feel jealous of a woman whose husband has been lost. But an unreachability, that's how she'd put it. This plump, kind-natured woman sitting on the couch surrounded by children

But there is this: Both with the discovery of David's illness, and then again with his death, it was William I called first. I think—but I don't remember—that I must have said something like "Oh William, help me." Because he did. He got my husband to a different doctor—a better one, I do believe—although there was nothing any doctor could do at that point. And then, with the death, William helped me again.

I felt terrible for this man who used to be my husband. We talked a long time about Estelle and Bridget, and then a little bit about our girls; he asked that he be the one to tell Chrissy and Becka about Estelle leaving, and I said, Of course.

the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.

don't you make pancakes?" It was a family custom to have pancakes

Stupid — this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right.

him. "Lost a little weight now we don't have our crackers and cheese every night. But I guess I look like hell." He would say that

At David's service in a funeral home in the city—which was then, and is now, all a blur to me—I do remember Becka whispering to me, "Dad wishes he could sit up here with us." "He said that to you?" I asked, turning to look at her, and she nodded solemnly. Poor William, I thought.

has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government—education, food, rent subsidies—are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.

Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn't want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer.

Who, who, does not have their basket of trips? It