256 Quotes by Elizabeth Strout

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

I think our job – maybe even our ‘duty’ – is to – To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.

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

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.

They say that’s what happens as you get older. You think about the things of your youth.

Because we all love imperfectly.

The fact of the matter is I always have a really high sense of responsibility to the reader, whether it’s a few readers that I get or a lot of readers, which I was lucky enough to get with ‘Olive.’ I feel responsible to them, to deliver something as truthful and straight as I can.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed.

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.