Top 200 Elizabeth Strout Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “You’ve been through a great deal,” his mother conceded. “But the back strengthens to the burdens it has to bear, and I’d like to see a little more backbone in you.”

— Elizabeth Strout

102. “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

103. “She came to understand that people had to decide, really, how they were going to live.”

— Elizabeth Strout

104. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

106. “Olive glanced at him quickly. He was crying. She looked away, and from the corner of her eye, she saw him reach into his pocket, heard him blow his nose, a real honk. “My wife died in December,” he said. Olive watched the river. “Then, you’re in hell,” she said. “Then, I’m in hell.”

— Elizabeth Strout

107. “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

108. “I see.” I didn’t see, though. How do we ever see something about our own self?”

— Elizabeth Strout

109. “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

110. “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

111. “That day of the parade in the Village, I think – but I’m not sure – that William and I had a fight. Because I remember him saying, “Button, you just don’t get it, do you?” He meant I did not understand that I could be loved, was lovable. Very often he said that when we had a fight. He was the only man to call me “Button.” But he was not the last to say the other: You just don’t get it, do you?”

— Elizabeth Strout

112. “He put the blinker on, pulled out onto the avenue. “Well, that was nice,” she said, sitting back. They had fun together these days, they really did. It was as if marriage had been a long, complicatd meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.”

— Elizabeth Strout

113. “Betty was still weeping, but she was smiling more too, and she said, “Oh, it’s just a life, Olive.” Olive thought about this. She said, “Well, it’s your life. It matters.”

— Elizabeth Strout

114. “The fact of the matter is I always have a really high sense of responsibility to the reader, whether it’s a few readers that I get or a lot of readers, which I was lucky enough to get with ‘Olive.’ I feel responsible to them, to deliver something as truthful and straight as I can.”

— Elizabeth Strout

115. “No one in this world comes from nothing.”

— Elizabeth Strout

116. “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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

117. “And then later, as the ambulance went faster, Abel felt not fear but a strange exquisite joy, the bliss of things finally and irretrievably out of his control, unpeeled, unpeeling now. Yet there was a streak of something else, as though just outside his reach was the twinkle of a light, as though a Christmas window was there; this puzzled him and pleased him, and in his state of tired ecstasy it seemed almost to come to him.”

— Elizabeth Strout

118. “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

119. “Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”

— Elizabeth Strout

120. “They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil.”

— Elizabeth Strout

121. “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

122. “Looking back, I imagine that I was very odd, that I spoke too loudly, or that I said nothing when things of popular culture were mentioned; I think I responded strangely to ordinary types of humor that were unknown to me. I think I didn’t understand the concept of irony at all, and that confused people. When.”

— Elizabeth Strout

123. “That happens in hotel rooms, people have bad dreams.”

— Elizabeth Strout

124. “Do not ever think you are better than someone, I will not tolerate that in my classroom, there is no one here who is better than someone else, I have just witnessed expressions on the faces of some of you that indicate you think you are better than someone else, and I will not tolerate that in my classroom, I will not.”

— Elizabeth Strout

125. “Both of them laughed until they had tears in their eyes, and even then they kept on laughing. But Mary thought: Not one thing lasts forever; still, may Angelina have this moment for the rest of her life.”

— Elizabeth Strout

126. “To listen to a person is not passive.”

— Elizabeth Strout

127. “And he looked at me then, and with real kindness on his face, and I see now that he recognized what I did not: that in spite of my plenitude, I was lonely. 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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “I loved New York for this gift of endless encounters.”

— Elizabeth Strout

131. “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

132. “He hated dishonesty – or lack of courage – more than anything.”

— Elizabeth Strout

133. “But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone.”

— Elizabeth Strout

134. “I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” 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

135. “Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves.”

— Elizabeth Strout

136. “The facts didn’t matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.”

— Elizabeth Strout

137. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

139. “Now, how does that feel, I’ve always wondered. To be known as a Pretty Nicely Girl?”

— Elizabeth Strout

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

143. “Then I understood I would never marry him. 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.”

— Elizabeth Strout

144. “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

145. “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

146. “When I got back to New York after seeing my father – and my mother, the year before – after seeing them for the last time, the world began to look different to me.”

— Elizabeth Strout

147. “But the news reporters had no wish, perhaps no ability, to understand that the fishermen’s coastline had been spoiled with toxic waste, that they could not fish as they once had – Americans really did not understand desperation. It was easier, and certainly more pleasing, to view the Gulf of Aden as a lawless place where Somali pirates reigned. A crazy parent, America was. Good and openhearted one way, dismissive and cruel in others.”

— Elizabeth Strout

148. “So – you’re a writer. You’re an artist.”

— Elizabeth Strout

149. “But never mind, Olive thinks now. You move aside and make way for the new.”

— Elizabeth Strout

150. “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.”

— Elizabeth Strout