Olive Kitteridge

by Elizabeth Strout

You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait.

But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

“All these lives,” she said. “All the stories we never know.”

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