Top 200 Elizabeth Strout Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, 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... You cannot hear my heart breaking, and I know that part is true, but to me, they are inseparable, the sound of growing corn and the sound of my heart breaking.”

— Elizabeth Strout

52. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

54. “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

55. “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

56. “But Lucy loved them, she loved her mother, and her mother loved her! We’re all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it’s okay.”

— Elizabeth Strout

57. “And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they had, everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger – simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.”

— Elizabeth Strout

58. “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

59. “Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that’s what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.”

— Elizabeth Strout

60. “And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect: This was true for Jim and Helen, and for Margaret and himself, as well.”

— Elizabeth Strout

61. “And – I know the defensiveness in this sentence – my parents and my sister and my brother never wrote me, or called me, and when I called them it was always hard; I felt I heard in their voices anger, a habitual resentment, as though they were silently saying You are not one of us, as though I had betrayed them by leaving them.”

— Elizabeth Strout

62. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “She remembered was hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed.”

— Elizabeth Strout

68. “This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

70. “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

71. “And so there’s a struggle, or a contest, I guess you could say, all the time, it seems to me. And remorse, well, to be able to show remorse – to be able to be sorry about what we’ve done that’s hurt other people – that keeps us human.” Tommy.”

— Elizabeth Strout

72. “You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”

— Elizabeth Strout

73. “Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed.”

— Elizabeth Strout

74. “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

75. “You’re an easy woman to please,” he had said to her. And she had said, “You may be the first person to think that.”

— Elizabeth Strout

76. “Her son had married his mother, as all men – in some form or other – eventually do.”

— Elizabeth Strout

77. “Bullies are just frightened people.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

79. “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

80. “When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

— Elizabeth Strout

81. “Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.”

— Elizabeth Strout

82. “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

83. “What I mean is, this is not just a woman’s story. It’s what happens to a lot of us, if we are lucky enough to hear that detail and pay attention.”

— Elizabeth Strout

84. “And that woman is not politics. She’s a person, and she has every right to be here.”

— Elizabeth Strout

85. “And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.”

— Elizabeth Strout

86. “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

87. “No. I had enough of babies growing up.” “Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.”

— Elizabeth Strout

88. “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

89. “I wrote the story, but you will bring to it your own experience of life, and some other reader will do the same, and it will become a different story with each reader. I believe that even the time in your life when you read the book will determine how you receive it. Our lives are changing constantly, and therefore not even our own story is always what we think it is.”

— Elizabeth Strout

90. “This must be the way most of us maneuver in the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the street, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.”

— Elizabeth Strout

91. “She was as beautiful as her face, I thought, and I loved NEw York for this gift of endless encounters.”

— Elizabeth Strout

92. “And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she’d felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist’s gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.”

— Elizabeth Strout

93. “Her grandmother said, “Don’t come back. Don’t get married. Don’t have children. All those things will bring you heartache.”

— Elizabeth Strout

94. “But we’re both old enough to know things now, and that’s good.” “What things?” “When to shut up, mainly.”

— Elizabeth Strout

95. “But at this stage of the game, she is not about to abandon the comfort of food, and that means right now she probably looks like a fat, dozing seal wrapped in some kind of gauze bandage.”

— Elizabeth Strout

96. “A Republican, then?” Jack asked, after a moment. “Oh, for God’s sake.” Olive stopped walking, looked at him through her sunglasses. “I didn’t say moron. You mean because we have a cowboy for a president? Or before that an actor who played a cowboy? Let me tell you, that idiot ex-cocaine-addict was never a cowboy. He can wear all the cowboy hats he wants. He’s a spoiled brat to the manor born. And he makes me puke.”

— Elizabeth Strout

97. “Stop it! Tell me how it’s really been! He sat back, pushed his glass forward. It’s just the way it was, that’s all. People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.”

— Elizabeth Strout

98. “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

99. “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

100. “He had a friend. He would have said this if he could, he would have said it, but there was no need: Like his sweet Sophia who loved her Snowball, Abel had a friend. 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