Top 200 Elizabeth Strout Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was.”

— Elizabeth Strout

2. “Traits don’t change, states of mind do.”

— Elizabeth Strout

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “How did you ever know? You never knew anything, and anyone who thought they knew anything – well, they were in for a great big surprise.”

— Elizabeth Strout

9. “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

10. “I think our job – maybe even our ‘duty’ – is to – To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

— Elizabeth Strout

11. “A person gets tired. The mind or the soul or whatever word we have for whatever is not just the body gets tired, and this, I have decided, is – usually, mostly – nature helping us. I was getting tired. I think – but I don’t know – that he was getting tired too.”

— Elizabeth Strout

12. “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

13. “You get used to things, he thinks, without getting used to things.”

— Elizabeth Strout

14. “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

15. “The appetites of the body were private battles.”

— Elizabeth Strout

16. “This was the skin that protected you from the world – this loving of another person you shared your life with.”

— Elizabeth Strout

17. “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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

18. “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

19. “No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.”

— Elizabeth Strout

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

23. “There was an old African proverb Dottie had read one day that said, “After a man eats, he becomes shy.” And Dottie thought of that now with Shelly. Shelly was like the man in the proverb; having satisfied her needs, she was ashamed. She had confided more than she had wanted to, and now Dottie was somehow to blame.”

— Elizabeth Strout

24. “It’s our duty to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

— Elizabeth Strout

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

27. “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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

28. “Each of his son’s had been his favorite child.”

— Elizabeth Strout

29. “Because we all love imperfectly.”

— Elizabeth Strout

30. “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

31. “Everyone thinks they know everything, and no one knows a damn thing.”

— Elizabeth Strout

32. “My mother told me in the hospital that day that I was not like my brother and sister: “Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and... did it.” Perhaps she meant that I was already ruthless. Perhaps she meant that, but I don’t know what my mother meant.”

— Elizabeth Strout

33. “But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make.”

— Elizabeth Strout

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

39. “But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union – what pieces life took out of you. Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude – and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”

— Elizabeth Strout

40. “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

41. “To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.”

— Elizabeth Strout

42. “Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic – you were made to feel guilty about everything.”

— Elizabeth Strout

43. “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!” How did she know this, my dear, dear child? At such a young age she knew this. When she told me, I looked at her. I said, “You’re right.”

— Elizabeth Strout

44. “What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway – like phantom limbs, he supposed.”

— Elizabeth Strout

45. “People could surprise you. Not just their kindness, but also their sudden ability to express things the right way.”

— Elizabeth Strout

46. “Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can’t stand the blah-blah-blah.”

— Elizabeth Strout

47. “And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when – as in her own case – it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering – as Olive had suffered – seemed cruel, and she kept silent.”

— Elizabeth Strout

48. “I 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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

49. “People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.”

— Elizabeth Strout

50. “This is Lucy.” She added, almost playfully, “Lucy comes from nothing.” I took no offense, and really, I take none now. But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing.”

— Elizabeth Strout