Home > Work > Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)
21 " Betty was still weeping, but she was smiling more too, and she said, “Oh, it’s just a life, Olive.” Olive thought about this. She said, “Well, it’s your life. It matters. "
― Elizabeth Strout , Olive, Again (Olive Kitteridge, #2)
22 " 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. "
23 " And that woman is not politics. She’s a person, and she has every right to be here. "
24 " there’s not one goddamn person in this world who doesn’t have a bad memory or two to take with them through life. "
25 " I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to—” Her voice became calm, adultlike. “To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can. "
26 " And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone. "
27 " he was an old man who was talking to himself on a wharf in Portland, Maine, and he could not—Jack Kennison, with his two PhDs—he could not figure out how this had happened. "
28 " The house where she had raised her son—never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home. "
29 " the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She "
30 " And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone. — "
31 " thought of the ants that were still going about trying to get their sand wherever they needed it to go. They seemed almost heartbreaking to him, in their tininess and their resilience. "
32 " People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something. "
33 " It was to be taken seriously, Olive saw this. All love was to be taken seriously, including her own brief love for her doctor. But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much. Olive finally said, leaning forward in her chair, “Here’s what I think, young lady. I think you’re doin’ excellent.” Then she sat back. What a thing love was. Olive felt it for Betty, even with that bumper sticker on her truck. "
34 " Eventually Olive found the Chipmans; they had lived an hour away in Saco, and he was a retired engineer and his wife was a retired nurse. Both were Democrats, thank God, so they could talk about the mess of the world, and they ate their supper together, the three of them at a table for four. This helped Olive; it gave her a place. The fact that she thought they were both a bit dull was not something she dwelled on, but often enough after eating with them she would roll her eyes on the way back to her room. This is how she lived. "
35 " But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish— "
36 " But it’s never starting over, Cindy, it’s just continuing on. "
37 " He understood that he was a seventy-four-year-old man who looks back at life and marvels that it unfolded as it did, who feels unbearable regret for all the mistakes made. "
38 " should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect: "
39 " She almost had no preference for any kind of book, and she had sometimes thought that odd; she had read Shakespeare and the thrillers of Sharon McDonald, and biographies of Samuel Johnson and different playwrights, silly romance novels, and also—the poets. She thought, privately, that poets just about sat on the right hand of God. "
40 " Cindy looked up at this woman before her; she saw in her eyes a distinct light. “I can call you Olive. Hello, Olive.” Cindy looked around and said, “Here, pull up that chair. "