Jennifer

“Olive. . . knows that loneliness can kill people - in different ways can actually make you die. Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts". Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere in the room.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child - that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else's home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one's own.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“It’s just that I’m the kind of person," Rebecca continued, "that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge