Strout Quotes

#1. Libby Strout, you deserve to be seen.

Jennifer Niven

#2. You are the most amazing person I've ever met. You're different. You're you. Always. Who else can say that except maybe Seth Powell, and he's an idiot. You, Libby Strout, are not an idiot.

Jennifer Niven

#3. People can be great, but they can also be lousy. I am often lousy. But not completely lousy. You, Libby Strout, are great.

Jennifer Niven

#4. Too many people in this world think small is the best they can do. Not you, Libby Strout. You weren't born for small! You don't know how to do small! Small is not in you!

Jennifer Niven

#5. Libby Strout." His mouth and eyes are serious. I don't think I've ever seen him so serious. "You are wanted.

Jennifer Niven

#6. God, I'm scared,' he said, quietly. She almost said, 'Oh, stop. I hate scared people.

Elizabeth Strout

#7. 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

#8. I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New Englanders, and so, in my writing, I've been drawn back there to the landscape and the light and the type of personality that's revealed.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#10. To listen to a person is not passive.

Elizabeth Strout

#11. 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

#12. But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.

Elizabeth Strout

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere in the room.

Elizabeth Strout

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Elizabeth Strout

#21. 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

#22. The privacy of sorrow.

Elizabeth Strout

#23. I sometimes miss the sense of excitement that I remember having when I was younger. I miss that sense of, 'Oh wow.' I think it's part of aging.

Elizabeth Strout

#24. Something on his, and he held up a hand to indicate

Elizabeth Strout

#25. I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#27. Now, how does that feel, I've always wondered. To be known as a Pretty Nicely Girl?

Elizabeth Strout

#28. I took myself - secretly, secretly - very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn't know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)

Elizabeth Strout

#29. I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#31. Each of his son's had been his favorite child.

Elizabeth Strout

#32. 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

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

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#36. He hated dishonesty-- or lack of courage-- more than anything.

Elizabeth Strout

#37. It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning.

Elizabeth Strout

#38. 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

#39. Jim, because he was angry even back then and trying to control it, she felt, and Bob because his heart was big. She didn't care much for Susan. "Nobody did, far as I know," she said.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#41. kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts. My

Elizabeth Strout

#42. The leaves were half-gone now. The Norway maples still hung on to their yellow, but most of the orangey-red of the sugar maples had found their way to the ground, leaving behind the stark branches that seemed to hang like stuck-out arms and tiny fingers, skeletal and bleak.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#44. I thought how when I got out of the hospital I would never again walk down the sidewalk without giving thanks for being one of those people,

Elizabeth Strout

#45. It saddened me that sometimes shopping was far more perilous than dealing with zombies and vampires.

Anton Strout

#46. The trees off to the side have been cut down to make a parking lot. You get used to things, he thinks, without getting used to things.

Elizabeth Strout

#47. 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

#48. 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

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

Elizabeth Strout

#50. And it was too late. No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is.

Elizabeth Strout

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. I was doing what I have done for most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don't know they have embarrassed themselves.

Elizabeth Strout

#54. 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

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

Elizabeth Strout

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. ... and that was when I learned that work gets done if you simply do it.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#62. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired, too.

Elizabeth Strout

#63. 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

#64. with the group of Somali men who gathered

Elizabeth Strout

#65. I suspect I said nothing because I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don't know they have embarrassed themselves. I do this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time.

Elizabeth Strout

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. Because we all love imperfectly.

Elizabeth Strout

#69. 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

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

Elizabeth Strout

#71. So much of life seems speculation.

Elizabeth Strout

#72. 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

#73. Of all the ways I had imagined my death, getting beaten by my zombified mentor while trapped by a cannibalistic window handle wasn't one of them

Anton Strout

#74. 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.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#76. 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

#77. Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately. Absolutely nuts. She was so mad at Jim O'Casey. She was so mad, she went into the woods and hit a tree hard enough to make her hand bleed. She cried down by the creek until she gagged.

Elizabeth Strout

#78. She felt she had figured something out too late, and that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late.

Elizabeth Strout

#79. You surely know that in the course of a long marriage it is not unusual for a husband or a wife to develop a crush on someone else.

Elizabeth Strout

#80. Only a few leaves of deep red remain on the otherwise bare limbs of the maples; the oak leaves are russet and wrinkled; briefly through the trees is the glimpse of the bay, flat and steel-gray today with the overcast November sky.

Elizabeth Strout

#81. 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

#82. It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men

Elizabeth Strout

#83. Don't be scared of your hunger. If you're scared of your hunger, you'll just be one more ninny like everyone else.

Elizabeth Strout

#84. the way you could hear outside in the open air - when the conditions were exactly right - the corn growing in the fields of my youth.

Elizabeth Strout

#85. 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

#86. She said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tel us who we are and what we think and what we do.

Elizabeth Strout

#87. You never know what attracts people to each other,

Elizabeth Strout

#88. I don't want to live in Maine full time, but the physical beauty is very striking. It is the exact opposite of New York. When you walk through my small town to get a cup of coffee, you bump into five people you know.

Elizabeth Strout

#89. 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

#90. He thought of all the people in the world who felt they'd been saved by a city. He was one of them.

Elizabeth Strout

#91. For Angie time was as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense out of it was like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean was deep.

Elizabeth Strout

#92. 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

#93. You have family", Bob said. "You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family".

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

#95. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son's life. But

Elizabeth Strout

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us.

Elizabeth Strout

#100. You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

Elizabeth Strout