Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

Both of them laughed until they had tears in their eyes, and even then they kept on laughing. But Mary thought: Not one thing lasts forever; still, may Angelina have this moment for the rest of her life.

Everyone thinks like themselves, this is my point.

she feels her stomach turn choppy, whitecaps in her stomach.

She did not have a family as other people did. Other people had their children come and stay and they talked and laughed and the grandchildren sat on the laps of their grandmothers, and they went places and did things, ate meals together, kissed when they parted.

She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.

Everyone has to feel like they matter.

Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves.

If she were Catholic, she could kneel, kneel and bow her head inside a church with brilliant stained-glass windows and streaks of golden light falling over her. Yes, oh yes, she would kneel and stretch out her arms, holding to her Amy and Dottie and Bev.

Walking down the sidewalk I thought how my mother had never said I love you to me, and I thought how Chrissy had been going to call the baby Lucy. She loved me, my daughter! Even knowing this, I was surprised. In truth, I was amazed.

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.

Everyone thinks they know everything, and no one knows a damn thing.

And that woman is not politics. She's a person, and she has every right to be here.

My point is, if we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little.

Here is the thing that Cindy, for the rest of her life, would never forget: Olive Kitteridge said, "My God, but I have always loved the light in February." Olive shook her head slowly. "My God," she repeated, with awe in her voice. "Just look at that February light.

Olive finished the doughnut, wiped the sugar from her fingers, sat back and said, "You're starving." The girl didn't move, only said, "Uh-duh." "I'm starving too," Olive said. The girl looked over at her. "I am," Olive said. "Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?" "You're not starving," Nina said in disgust. "Sure I am. We all are.

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.

we never know, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully. It seems a simple thought, but as I get older I see more and more that she had to tell us that.

Nothing is what you imagine. Her mind hovered above this simple and alarming thought. The variables were too great, the particularities too distinct, life a flood of translations from the shadow-edged yearnings of the heart to the immutable aspects of the physical world.

oh, I can't really explain what I thought! But it was very strange to think that the children I had were already—in just one generation—so different, so very different, from me and what I had come from.

You get used to things, he thinks, without getting used to things.

To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.

My mother did not like Unitarians; she thought they were atheists who didn't want to be left out of the fun of Christmas

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger—simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.