Neda’s Reviews > Olive Kitteridge > Status Update

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.

She 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.”

How to behave with a little girl?? Olive is so cute :))))

“What is that on your chin?”

Olive sees that the little girl has been chewing on a ribbon from her dress. “Crumbs,” Olive says. “From little girls I’ve eaten up. Now go away before I eat you, too.” She makes her eyes big.

The girl steps back slightly, holding the doorjamb. “You’re making that up,” she finally says, but she turns and disappears.

Still the child says nothing. “Run along now,” Olive tells her, but the girl leans against the doorjamb and sways slightly, her eyes fixed on Olive. “Not polite to stare,” Olive says. “Didn’t anyone teach you that?”

The little girl, still swaying, says calmly, “You look dead.”

Olive lifts her head up. “Is that what they teach you to say these days?”

“To love and be loved is the most important thing in life,” causing Kevin to feel an inward fear that grew and spread through him, as though his very soul were tightening. ... Even Freud had said, “We must love or we grow ill.” They were spelling it out for him. Every billboard, movie, magazine cover, television ad—it all spelled it out for him: We belong to the world of family and love. And you don’t.