October 08, 2014

She had forgotten how angelic he'd looked, like some creature newly hatched, as though he had not yet grown a skin and was all light and luminescence.

Olive Kitteridge
By Elizabeth Strout

I finished the book and I finished the miniseries. Both (IMO) very much worth reading and seeing. I'll post more excerpts over the next few days.

"One evening when she returned home, she looked through a drawer of old photographs. Her mother, plump and smiling, but still foreboding. Her father, tall, stoic; his silence in life seemed right there in the photo--he was, she thought, the biggest mystery of all. A picture of Henry as a small child. Huge-eyed and curly-haired, he was looking at the photographer (his mother?) with a child's fear and wonder. Another photo of him in the navy, tall and thin, just a kid, really, waiting for life to begin. You will marry a beast and love her, Olive thought. You will have a son and love him. You will be endlessly kind to townspeople as they come to you for medicine, tall in your white lab coat. You will end your days blind and mute in a wheelchair. That will be your life.
Olive slipped the picture back into the drawer, her eye catching a photo of Christopher, taken when he was not yet two. She had forgotten how angelic he'd looked, like some creature newly hatched, as though he had not yet grown a skin and was all light and luminescence. You will marry a beast and she will leave you, Olive thought. You will move across the country and break your mother's heart. She closed the drawer. But you will not stab a woman twenty-nine times."
(p. 161)

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