256 Quotes by Elizabeth Strout

But never mind, Olive thinks now. You move aside and make way for the new.

People like to think the younger generation’s job is to steer the world to hell. But it’s never true, is it? They’re hopeful and good – and that’s how it should be.

I don’t think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

Sarah Payne, the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.

Looking back, I imagine that I was very odd, that I spoke too loudly, or that I said nothing when things of popular culture were mentioned; I think I responded strangely to ordinary types of humor that were unknown to me. I think I didn’t understand the concept of irony at all, and that confused people. When.

This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us.

Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can’t stand the blah-blah-blah.

But the mind, or the heart, she didn’t know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn’t get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it.

I was doing what I have done for most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don’t know they have embarrassed themselves.