Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

believing that in the presence of this person we are safe.

like I was a fish swimming round and round and then I bumped into this rock.

The sadness that rose and fell in me was like the tides.

Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

they had joked about that—how the girl had no idea, as she 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.

Who knows why people are different? We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us. ii

it was not love that sustained a marriage but the marriage that would sustain the love.

You belong to society, you give to society.

great landscape painters understood one thing: that everything in nature started from the same color.

it was as though huge windows above her had been smashed—the way the firemen must have smashed the windows of her childhood home— and now, here above her and around her, was the whole wide world right there, available to her once again.

Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! — Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. — But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

we drove I suddenly had a visceral memory of what a hideous thing marriage was for me at times those years

I really do not know what I mean, except to say that on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.

Intimacy became a ghastly thing.

they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other.

We're all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it's okay.

He made me feel that I mattered.

Up in Shirley Falls, spring was slower to arrive. Nights were cold, but the way the dawn light cracked open along the horizon, bringing a gentle moistness that lightly touched the skin, spoke of a full-throated summer to come, and it was painful, all the promise in the air.

Driving home, Tommy was aware of a sensation like that of a tire becoming flat, as though he had been filled—all his life—with some sustaining air, and it was gone now; he felt, increasingly as he drove, a sense of fear.

with the group of Somali men who gathered

Looking back, I imagine that I was very odd, that I spoke too loudly, or that I said nothing when things of popular culture were mentioned; I think I responded strangely to ordinary types of humor that were unknown to me. I think I didn't understand the concept of irony at all, and that confused people. When I first met my husband William, I felt—and it was a surprise—that he really did understand something in me.

She could make the bed, do the laundry, feed the dog. But she could not be bothered with any more meals. "What'll we have for supper?" Henry would ask, coming upstairs from the basement. "Strawberries.

The truth is, Olive, Amy is good to me, but she does live in Iowa, and I sometimes think when a child moves that far away they're really trying to get away from something, and in this case I suspect it's me.

It was shame that swiped across her soul, like these windshield wipers before her: two large black long fingers, relentless and rhythmic in their chastisement.