Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.

You get used to things, he thinks, without getting used to things.

No longer the girl she had been—no girl stayed a girl—but

no, Kevin could not abide the thought of any child discovering what he had discovered; that his mother’s need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards.

oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.

It was the case with Angie that people knew very little about her, assuming at the same time that other people knew her moderately well.

Two bars into the first song, Angie was always happy. For her, it was as though she had slipped inside the music.

She always played his song because whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of air.

You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn’t go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late.

It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.

People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son’s life.

It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.