Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

The appetites of the body were private battles.

She knows that loneliness can kill people - in different ways can actually make you die. (68)

And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.

She remembered was 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.

Sarah Payne, 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.

To listen to a person is not passive.

It is a gift in this life that we do not know what awaits us.

In case you haven't noticed, people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because they can't stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it's okay we did whatever we did.

This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.

Each of his son's had been his favorite child.

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

You have family", Bob said. "You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family".

A friend had said to me once, "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 left.

It 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.

I am not invisible no matter how deeply I feel that I am.

I took myself—secretly, secretly—very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn't know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)

He looked at the books, and she wanted to say, 'Stop that,' as though he were reading her diary.

Back and forth she went each morning by the river, spring arriving once again; foolish, foolish spring, breaking open its tiny buds, and what she couldn't stand was how—for many years, really—she had been made happy by such a thing. She had not thought she would ever become immune to the beauty of the physical world, but there you were. The river sparkled with the sun that rose, enough that she needed her sunglasses.

ANYONE WHO HAS EVER GRIEVED knows that grieving carries with it a tremendous wear and tear to the body itself, never mind the soul. Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually.

And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

But we're both old enough to know things now, and that's good." "What things?" "When to shut up, mainly.

I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

When you get old," Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, "you become invisible. It's just the truth. And yet it's freeing in a way.