Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

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 it.

This is because my husband had died a year earlier; also I am often despondent at the end of a book tour, and this had been made worse because I no longer had David to call from the road. That was the hardest part of the tour for me: not having David to speak to each day.

One more: This had to do with death. It had to do with a sense of leaving, he could feel himself almost leaving the world and he did not believe in any afterlife and so this filled him on certain nights with a kind of terror.

But she no longer felt sadness about it, the pressure of sorrow that had overtaken her at the table, the longing for all the Burgess kids, and the sense of the irreplaceable familiarity of her old life-that had passed the way the cramping of a stomach muscle passes, and the absence of its pain was glorious.

But with my mother I didn't dare cry. Both my parents loathed the act of crying, and it's difficult for a child who is crying to have to stop, knowing if she doesn't stop everything will be made worse. This is not an easy position for any child.

Le piacerebbe pranzare insieme uno di questi giorni?" "Vorrei cenare insieme", rispose lui. "Mi darebbe qualcosa da aspettare. Se esco a pranzo, poi avrò ancora davanti il resto della giornata".

And as time went by, the idea of seeing the girls that way again was almost as bad as not seeing them at all.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

I don't think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, 'I might do the dishes,' I don't. But then the dishes multiply.

I'm just telling you, Tommy. He wasn't supposed to go and do those things in the war that he had to do. People aren't supposed to murder people. And he did, and he did awful things, and awful things happened to him, and he couldn't live inside himself, Tommy. That's what I'm trying to say. Other men could do it, but he couldn't, it ruined him, and—

What seems a loss of interest is in fact a failure of trust, of shared intimacy.

She could not have predicted, no one can ever predict anything, that they'd have been raised at a time of protests and drugs and a war they seemed to feel no responsibility for. She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far. The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago. The

And then I remembered that one time, when I was pregnant with Chrissy, I had looked down at my big stomach and put my hand over it and thought: Whoever you are, you do not belong to me. My job is to help you get into the world, but you do not belong to me.

They would be hyphenated people. Somali-American. What a strange thing, Abdikarim thought, to become hyphenated to a country now gratifying itself with the impression that all Somalis were pirates.

Whenever I don't know what to do, I watch what I am doing." And what I was doing that year was leaving, even though I had not yet

She loved me, my daughter! Even knowing this, I was surprised. In truth, I was amazed.

A gift, she thought again, placing her mittened hand lightly on his leg, a gift to be able to know someone for so many years.

When you get old....you become invisible. It's just the truth. And yet it's freeing in a way.

George shrugged. "You just stood up to your mother, Tyler. I should think now you could take on the world.

In the best stories that sense comes through: it is what it is.

She thought then about Henry, the kindness in his eyes as a young man, and the kindness still there when he was blind from his stroke, the pleasant expression on his face as he sat in that wheelchair, staring. She thought about Jack, his sly smile, and she thought about Christopher. She had been lucky, she supposed. She had been loved by two men, and that had been a lucky thing; without luck, why would they have loved her? But they had. And her son seemed to have come around.

Kids are just a needle in your heart.

And it seemed that my ping-pong ball could not touch his right now. We are alone in these things that we suffer.

But I did not go back to sleep. I stayed awake and I thought: We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.