Elizabeth Strout 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.

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

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.

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

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.

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.

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.

People like to think the younger generation's job is to steer the world to hell. But it's never true, is it? They're hopeful and good - and that's how it should be.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything

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

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.

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.

No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

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

Without a doubt my mother was an inspiration for my writing. This is true in many ways, but mostly because she is a wonderful storyteller, without even knowing it.

Bullies are just frightened people.

The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago.

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

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.

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.

My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it.

The appetites of the body were private battles.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.

I do write by hand. I just think - I don't know, it's a physical thing for me. It's a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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

society's been drugging its women for years

To listen to a person is not passive.

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

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

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.

But early on I saw this: 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.

She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far.

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