Abide with Me Quotes

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“ANYONE WHO HAS EVER GRIEVED knows that grieving carries with it a tremendous wear and tear to the body itself, never mind the soul. Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“No one, to my knowledge, has figured out the secret to love. We love imperfectly, Tyler. We all do. Even Jesus wrestled with that. But I think - I think the ability to receive love is as important as the ability to give it. It's one and the same really.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“You just stood up to your mother.... I should think now you could take on the world.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“When other helpers fail and comforts flee . . . O Lord, abide with me.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“You've been through a great deal," his mother conceded. "But the back strengthens to the burdens it has to bear, and I'd like to see a little more backbone in you.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“He thought of Kierkegaard writing that “No one is born devoid of spirit, and no matter how many may go to their death with this spiritlessness, it is not the fault of Life.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“ANYONE WHO HAS EVER GRIEVED knows that grieving carries with it a tremendous wear and tear to the body itself, never mind the soul. Loss is an assault; a certain exhaustion, as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides, needs to be allowed for eventually. And Tyler, during the ten days he stayed with the Atwoods, spent an astonishing amount of time sleeping.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“As a matter of fact, I could argue that none of us has a center of gravity. That we’re tugged and pulled by competing forces every minute and we hold on as best we can.” He cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. “I could make that argument,” he said, tucking his handkerchief back in his pocket, “if I were so inclined.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“How he had slipped into his top desk drawer the quote from Henri Nouwen: “My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“And concluded that, without the ability to view life as a gift from the hand of God, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“Every night and every morning Tyler prayed. Always he ended, “Thy will be done.” He did not think a miracle was needed, nor did he believe in them—he saw all of life as a miracle. And if Tyler believed instead in the power of prayer, it’s because his praying felt strong and right, like a swimmer who has trained for years and feels safe in the water that buoys him up. Tyler loved God very much, and God would naturally know that. Tyler loved Lauren, and God would know that, too.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“Tyler,” she said quietly, “rich people are like Negroes. They’re fine. There is nothing wrong with them. But I say, and I have always said, let them live their lives, and I will live mine.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“Oh, it was God’s work. Love is always God’s work.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“He thought of Bonhoeffer writing that it was not love that sustained a marriage but the marriage that would sustain the love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“He often thought of Pasteur’s remarks that chance only helped those minds well prepared, and he hoped these days to have a moment of exalted understanding come to him as the “chance” result of his disciplined prayer.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“Still: This happened to be the first year in many where countrywide church membership had not increased at a greater rate than the general population, and that, if you thought about it, had to mean something. Possibly it meant people were not panicking. Possibly it meant people wanted to believe, and were apparently believing—particularly here in the northern reaches of New England, where the same people had lived for years, not many communists among them (although there were a few)—that after half a century of colossal human horror, the world really could perhaps be finally decent, and safe, and good.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“anxiety was the phenomenon of modern man. And why shouldn’t it be, Tyler asked, when modern culture has allowed us to worship ourselves?”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“our ability to forget is a gift.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“ALWAYS THINK of the other man first.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“What I didn’t know about death,” Tyler said, squinting at his fingernails, “was that it was not just the death of my father, but the death of my childhood, the death of the family as I’d known it. It reminds me of Glenn Miller’s plane disappearing above the channel. Not just the death of a bandleader, you see, but the death of a band.” He looked out the window. “That’s what death does. If that makes any sense.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“He knew one could say—perhaps Rhonda Skillings might say—that this was merely the plea of a frightened child reaching up in the dark to hold the hand of Parent God. But Tyler, softly humming the tune as he stood beneath the elm—fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide—thought God existed in the hymn itself, in the yearning and sorrowful acknowledgment of the loneliness and fears that arrived in life.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“She’ll get over it,” Belle said. “She’s not going to cut you out of her life. Meanwhile, welcome to grown-up land.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“to your mother, Tyler. I should think now you could take on the world.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“He was a man grieving, and she was ashamed at the kind of pleasure she had experienced in excoriating him to her friends and husband.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“When they hung up, Jane called Alison back. “Do you need a doctorate in psychology to know that killing someone is an angry thing to do?” The two women laughed until tears came to their eyes.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“And then the unthinkable, unimaginable thing that he did: He left the bottle of pills by her side while she slept. He went downstairs to sit with his mother, listening for any motion above. In a few hours he walked slowly, slowly up the carpeted stairs. His young wife was dead.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“You know what, Tyler?” said his big-stomached, beautiful wife. “You are aggressively naïve.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me