Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

I thought how when I got out of the hospital I would never again walk down the sidewalk without giving thanks for being one of those people

I wrote the story, but you will bring to it your own experience of life, and some other reader will do the same, and it will become a different story with each reader. I believe that even the time in your life when you read the book will determine how you receive it. Our lives are changing constantly, and therefore not even our own story is always what we think it is.

What I mean is, this is not just a woman's story. It's what happens to a lot of us, if we are lucky enough to hear that detail and pay attention

God, Olive, you're a difficult woman. You are such a goddamn difficult woman, and fuck all, I love you. So if you don't mind, Olive, maybe you could be a little less Olive with me, even if it means being a little more Olive with others. Because I love you, and we don't have much time.

But when I think Oh William!, don't I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don't I mean Oh Everyone, 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. — This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere in the room.

A person can only move forward, she thinks. A person should only move forward.

There is that constant judgment in this world: How are we going to make sure we do not feel inferior to another?

The year that followed - was it the happiest year of his own life? He often thought so, even knowing that such a thing was foolish to claim about any year of one's life: but in his memory, that particular year held the sweetness of a time that contained no thoughts of a beginning and no thoughts of an end..

At the end of the day, he said, "I will take care of you," his voice thick with emotion. She stood before him and nodded. He zipped her coat for her.

Watching her, I felt she was telling the truth. There was something about her that seemed deeply—almost fundamentally—comfortable inside herself, the way I think a person is when they have been loved by their parents.

The evenings grew longer; kitchen windows stayed open after dinner and peepers could be heard in the marsh. Isabelle, stepping out to sweep her porch steps, felt absolutely certain that some wonderful change was arriving in her life. The strength of this belief was puzzling; what she was feeling, she decided, was really the presence of God.

To deny my husband any chance of comforting me—oh, it was an unspeakably awful thing. And I had not known. This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.

I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.

society's been drugging its women for years

We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don't know it, that's all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through.

And she learned - freshly, scorchingly - of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn't. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, "You'll have another one.

And I also understood: Grief is a private thing. God, is it a private thing.

We're two lonely people having supper." "Exactly." said Bunny. "That's a date.

What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway—like phantom limbs, he supposed.

one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren't just moments, they were gifts.

Only a few leaves of deep red remain on the otherwise bare limbs of the maples; the oak leaves are russet and wrinkled; briefly through the trees is the glimpse of the bay, flat and steel-gray today with the overcast November sky.

And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child - that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else's home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one's own.

How did you ever know? You never knew anything, and anyone who thought they knew anything - well, they were in for a great big surprise.