Elizabeth Strout Quotes

#1. The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had - their inner selves brushing up against the other.

Elizabeth Strout

#2. She knows that loneliness can kill people - in different ways can actually make you die. (68)

Elizabeth Strout

#3. He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.

Elizabeth Strout

#4. I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.

Elizabeth Strout

#5. When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. That astonishment had to do with death, with the wiping out of a person, with the puzzlement that the man was simply gone.

Elizabeth Strout

#6. If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it.

Elizabeth Strout

#7. But the mind, or the heart, she didn't know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn't get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it.

Elizabeth Strout

#8. She wanted to be dead and she wanted her daughter to be dead too so that neither of them would have to face the unbearable business of continuing on. It

Elizabeth Strout

#9. So life goes on, I thought. (And now I think: It goes on, until it doesn't.)

Elizabeth Strout

#10. Why do you need everyone married?" Christopher has said to him angrily, when Henry has asked about his son's life. "Why can't you just leave people alone?"
He doesn't want people alone.

Elizabeth Strout

#11. one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren't just moments, they were gifts.

Elizabeth Strout

#12. No one in this world comes from nothing.

Elizabeth Strout

#13. I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.

Elizabeth Strout

#14. Because two people can't have entirely different opinions without one of them being final.

Elizabeth Strout

#15. A yearning stirred in him that was not sexual but a kind of reaching toward her simplicity of form. He

Elizabeth Strout

#16. While it is said that children accept their circumstances as normal, both Vicky and I understood that we were different. We

Elizabeth Strout

#17. I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

Elizabeth Strout

#18. The appetites of the body were private battles.

Elizabeth Strout

#19. we are free of each other, and yet not, and never will be.

Elizabeth Strout

#20. Pam replied that she was too old to worry about being cool, but in fact she did worry about it, and that's one reason it was always nice to see Bobby, who was so uncool as to inhabit - in Pam's mind - his own private condominium of coolness.

Elizabeth Strout

#21. It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author," and that alone made me glad I had come.

Elizabeth Strout

#22. society's been drugging its women for years

Elizabeth Strout

#23. Oh, gosh, Olive. I'm so embarrassed." "No need to be," Olive tells her. "We all want to kill someone at some point." (179)

Elizabeth Strout

#24. His blue eyes were watching her now; she saw in them the vulnerability, the invitation, the fear, as she sat down quietly, placed her open hand on his chest, felt the thump, thump of his heart, which would someday stop, as all hearts do. But there was no someday now.

Elizabeth Strout

#25. Sarah Payne, the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.

Elizabeth Strout

#26. She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.

Elizabeth Strout

#27. Her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do. A

Elizabeth Strout

#28. Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.

Elizabeth Strout

#29. In case you haven't noticed, people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because they can't stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it's okay we did whatever we did.

Elizabeth Strout

#30. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly.

Elizabeth Strout

#31. that - I would remember the view from the hospital window and be glad for the sidewalk I was walking on. To

Elizabeth Strout

#32. with the group of Somali men who gathered

Elizabeth Strout

#33. And if such a gift could come to him at such a time, then anything - dear girl from Rockford dressed up for her meeting, rushing above the Rock River - he opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything was possible for anyone.

Elizabeth Strout

#34. I have to pay attention to what I have felt and observed, then push these responses to an extreme while keeping the story within the realm of being psychologically and emotionally true.

Elizabeth Strout

#35. Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn't want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer. (45)

Elizabeth Strout

#36. The purpose of fiction is not to make people seem nice. What makes anyone think people are nice? Look around you!

Elizabeth Strout

#37. Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.

Elizabeth Strout

#38. A person can only move forward, she thinks. A person should only move forward.

Elizabeth Strout

#39. People, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side

Elizabeth Strout

#40. As a novelist, I like the contained drama and complexity of the courtroom, though I don't watch those shows on TV. I prefer the hospital shows because I wanted to be a doctor.

Elizabeth Strout

#41. I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me.

Elizabeth Strout

#42. We were not as close as you might expect; we were equally friendless and equally scorned, and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we viewed the rest of the world.

Elizabeth Strout

#43. I mention this because there is the question of how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act in it. How,

Elizabeth Strout

#44. That happens in hotel rooms, people have bad dreams.

Elizabeth Strout

#45. the tall white windmills that came to her mind. How their skinny long arms all turned, but never together, except for just once in a while two of them would be turning the same way, their arms poised at the same place in the sky.

Elizabeth Strout

#46. I don't especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I've never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child.

Elizabeth Strout

#47. cell phone. He gave her more water, told her to drink it slowly, then began leading her back the way they had come; her legs were

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#49. Stupid - this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right.

Elizabeth Strout

#50. For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.

Elizabeth Strout

#51. My parents were very, very, very strict.

Elizabeth Strout

#52. You just stood up to your mother ... I should think now you could take on the world.

Elizabeth Strout

#53. I grew up on a dirt road in Maine, and pretty much everybody on that dirt road was related to me, and they were old. And so grumpy.

Elizabeth Strout

#54. The disabilities of the people who came to him were established so young, in such delicate years, that their tender agonies were, by the time they arrived in his office, thickened into a stunned arrangement of expressions, deflections, and shrewd manipulations. No,

Elizabeth Strout

#55. the sense of apology did not go away; it was a tiring thing to carry. -

Elizabeth Strout

#56. Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.

Elizabeth Strout

#57. Speaking of this, he felt something had been returned to him, as though the inestimable losses of life had been lifted like a boulder, and beneath he saw - under the attentive gaze of Daisy's blue eyes - the comforts and sweetness of what had once been.

Elizabeth Strout

#58. Well, widow-comforter, how is she?" Olive spoke in the dark from the bed.
"Struggling," he said.
"Who isn't?

Elizabeth Strout

#59. Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately.

Elizabeth Strout

#60. Traits don't change, states of mind do.

Elizabeth Strout

#61. 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...

Elizabeth Strout

#62. All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)

Elizabeth Strout

#63. I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.

Elizabeth Strout

#64. The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

Elizabeth Strout

#65. I would hope that my readers feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance, at the endurance of love in the face of a variety of difficulties; that the quotidian life is not always easy, and is something worthy of respect.

Elizabeth Strout

#66. I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

Elizabeth Strout

#67. I don't think there's anybody I write about who I don't care for deeply in some way, no matter what their behavior is.

Elizabeth Strout

#68. Bullies are just frightened people.

Elizabeth Strout

#69. I don't think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, 'I might do the dishes,' I don't. But then the dishes multiply.

Elizabeth Strout

#70. No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

Elizabeth Strout

#71. 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.

Elizabeth Strout

#72. Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. (211)

Elizabeth Strout

#73. In the kind of New England I'm from, you are expected to stay and marry somebody from New England - well, Maine, actually - so I think it was seen as a betrayal when I left for New York, which has been my refuge.

Elizabeth Strout

#74. But in Jim O'Casey there had been a wariness, a quiet anger, and she had seen herself in him, had said to him once, We're both cut from the same piece of bad cloth. He had just watched her, eating his apple.

Elizabeth Strout

#75. She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at ths age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.

Elizabeth Strout

#76. Rebecca, standing at the window, felt a tiny smile inside her getting larger - how delicious it would be: one moment of perfect joy, propped up and righteous with booze, to let that first punch fly.

Elizabeth Strout

#77. How can people in California have problems with their feet?" asks Molly moving around Olive with a plate of sandwiches. "Don't they drive everywhere?

Elizabeth Strout

#78. Nothing is long ago.

Elizabeth Strout

#79. It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government - education, food, rent subsidies - are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.

Elizabeth Strout

#80. You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.

Elizabeth Strout

#81. But never mind, Olive thinks now. You move aside and make way for the new.

Elizabeth Strout

#82. There is that constant judgment in this world: How are we going to make sure we do not feel inferior to another?

Elizabeth Strout

#83. It's funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one's past, or one's clothes, but then - a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh. I

Elizabeth Strout

#84. she'd have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.

Elizabeth Strout

#85. It's just that I'm the kind of person,' Rebecca continued, 'that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn't be a pin for me.

Elizabeth Strout

#86. My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!

Elizabeth Strout

#87. boys. Defense attorneys for the whole crappy world." Bob's new apartment

Elizabeth Strout

#88. She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)

Elizabeth Strout

#89. Say the word, even now I can barely stand to

Elizabeth Strout

#90. I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them ... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.

Elizabeth Strout

#91. I got a gerontology certificate a million years ago along with my law degree, so I've been interested in older people for many years. Some people grow up with a lot of kids around, but I just grew up with a lot of old people.

Elizabeth Strout

#92. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true.

Elizabeth Strout

#93. You belong to society, you give to society.

Elizabeth Strout

#94. It is true she doesn't exercise, her cholesterol is sky-high. But all that is only a good excuse, hiding how it's her soul, really, that is wearing out.

Elizabeth Strout

#95. It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it's the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.

Elizabeth Strout

#96. It was a sad moment. There are sad moments in life, and this was one of them.

Elizabeth Strout

#97. It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.

Elizabeth Strout

#98. But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone.

Elizabeth Strout

#99. stopped coming home for lunch. He just stayed in his office

Elizabeth Strout

#100. I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

Elizabeth Strout