256 Quotes by Elizabeth Strout

Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had – their inner selves brushing up against the other.

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.

Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.

When I got back to New York after seeing my father – and my mother, the year before – after seeing them for the last time, the world began to look different to me.

But Lucy loved them, she loved her mother, and her mother loved her! We’re all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it’s okay.

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

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.