Through the trees there was a motion, a person walking on the road. Isabelle watched as the girl - it was Amy - moving slowly and with her head down, came up the gravel driveway. The sight of her pained Isabelle. It pained her terribly to see her, but why? Because she looked unhappy, her shoulders slumped like that, her neck thrust forward, walking slowly, just about dragging her feet. This was Isabelle's daughter; this was Isabelle's fault. She hadn't done it right, being a mother, and this youthful desolation walking up the driveway was exactly proof of that. But then Amy straightened up, glancing toward the house with a wary squint, and she seemed transformed to Isabelle, suddenly a presence to be reckoned with. Her limbs were long and even, her breasts beneath her T-shirt seemed round and right, neither large or small, only part of some pleasing symmetry; her face looked intelligent and shrewd. Isabelle, sitting motionless in her chair, felt intimidated. And angry. The anger arrived in one quick thrust. It was the sight of her daughter's body that angered her. It was not the girl's unpleasantness, or even the fact that she had been lying to Isabelle for so many months, nor did Isabelle hate Amy for taken up all the space in her life. She hated Amy because the girl had been enjoying the sexual pleasures of a man, while she herself had not. Elizabeth Strout
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More Quotes By Elizabeth Strout
  1. And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats--then Olive felt...
  2. Angelina said, "Mom. I don't want you to die. That's the whole thing. You took from me the ability to care for you in your old age, and I wanted to be with you when you died, when you die. Mom. I wanted that.
  3. She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at ths age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.
  4. People always kept moving, her mother had said, it's the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced - but moving...
  5. It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men
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