Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

Bob was not a young man, and he knew about loss. He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of release. He was not an especially contemplative person, and he did not dwell on this. But by October there were many days when the swell of rightness, loose-limbedness, and gentle gravity came to him. It recalled to him being a child, when he found one day he could finally color within the lines.

But here was the world, screeching its beauty at her day after day, and she felt grateful for it.

That happens in hotel rooms, people have bad dreams.

No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

Speaking of this, he felt something had been returned to him, as though the inestimable losses of life had been lifted like a boulder, and beneath he saw - under the attentive gaze of Daisy's blue eyes - the comforts and sweetness of what had once been.

thought to myself: William is the only person I ever felt safe with. He is the only home I ever had.

It was a sad moment. There are sad moments in life, and this was one of them.

His blue eyes were watching her now; she saw in them the vulnerability, the invitation, the fear, as she sat down quietly, placed her open hand on his chest, felt the thump, thump of his heart, which would someday stop, as all hearts do. But there was no someday now.

And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil.

This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say "Oh, honey, you're getting too big to be picked up" or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.

Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!

I loved New York for this gift of endless encounters.

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." Andrea

It is true she doesn't exercise, her cholesterol is sky-high. But all that is only a good excuse, hiding how it's her soul, really, that is wearing out.

I am the opposite of a snob." Jack laughed a long time. "You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Olive, you're a snob.

life picked up speed, and then most of it was gone—made you breathless, really.

Stop it! Tell me how it's really been! He sat back, pushed his glass forward. It's just the way it was, that's all. People either didn't know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.

I was standing one day on the front stoop, and as he came out of the building I said, "Jeremy, sometimes when I stand here, I can't believe Im really in New York City. I stand here and think, Whoever would have guessed? Me! I'm living in the City of New York!" And a look went across his face--so fast, so involuntary--that was a look of real distaste. I had not yet learned the depth of disgust city people feel for the truly provincial.

I see." I didn't see, though. How do we ever see something about our own self?

But what Tyler longed for was to have The Feeling arrive; when every flicker of light that touched the dipping branches of a weeping willow, every breath of breeze that bent the grass towards the row of apple trees, every shower of yellow ginko leaves dropping to the ground with such direct and tender sweetness, would fill the minister with profound and irreducible knowledge that God was right there.

I thought as I walked back to the airport—I thought: I know what that man feels like. (Except of course I do not.) But I thought: It's odd, because on one hand I think I am invisible, but on the other I know what it is like to be marked as separate from society, only in my case no one knows it when they see me. But I thought that about that fat man. And about myself.

Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.

no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father's ambitions.