256 Quotes by Elizabeth Strout

I’ve always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I’ve always been touched by the idea of criminality.

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.

The leaves were half-gone now. The Norway maples still hung on to their yellow, but most of the orangey-red of the sugar maples had found their way to the ground, leaving behind the stark branches that seemed to hang like stuck-out arms and tiny fingers, skeletal and bleak.

People could surprise you. Not just their kindness, but also their sudden ability to express things the right way.

This was the skin that protected you from the world – this loving of another person you shared your life with.

But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union – what pieces life took out of you.

But at this stage of the game, she is not about to abandon the comfort of food, and that means right now she probably looks like a fat, dozing seal wrapped in some kind of gauze bandage.

I don’t especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I’ve never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child.

But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make.