Top 200 Elizabeth Strout Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I am the opposite of a snob.” Jack laughed a long time. “You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Olive, you’re a snob.”

— Elizabeth Strout

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

161. “They say that’s what happens as you get older. You think about the things of your youth.”

— Elizabeth Strout

162. “The house where she had raised her son – never, ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.”

— Elizabeth Strout

163. “I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”

— Elizabeth Strout

164. “She did not have a family as other people did. Other people had their children come and stay and they talked and laughed and the grandchildren sat on the laps of their grandmothers, and they went places and did things, ate meals together, kissed when they parted.”

— Elizabeth Strout

165. “Everyone needs to feel important.”

— Elizabeth Strout

166. “And I also understood: Grief is a private thing. God, is it a private thing.”

— Elizabeth Strout

167. “It is a gift in this life that we do not know what awaits us.”

— Elizabeth Strout

168. “Personality disorder? Given the extensive and widespread array of human emotions, why was anything a personality disorder?”

— Elizabeth Strout

169. “Grief is such a – oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think. It is like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you.”

— Elizabeth Strout

170. “Whenever I don’t know what to do, I watch what I am doing.”

— Elizabeth Strout

171. “A friend had said to me once, “Whenever I don’t know what to do, I watch what I am doing.” And what I was doing that year was leaving, even though I had not yet left.”

— Elizabeth Strout

172. “People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.”

— Elizabeth Strout

173. “To deny my husband any chance of comforting me – oh, it was an unspeakably awful thing. And I had not known. This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.”

— Elizabeth Strout

174. “A little bit she was aware of the beauty she walked by, the sunlight sparkling off the quiet lake, the bare trees – it was beautiful, she was not unaware of this, but it was futile, and far away. Mostly she looked down at the muddy roots in front of her; the path, uneven with its little use, required concentration to maneuver. Perhaps it was the concentration that allowed her into the day.”

— Elizabeth Strout

175. “To be in love when the outcome is uncertain is an exquisite kind of agony.”

— Elizabeth Strout

176. “Please try to understand this: I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.”

— Elizabeth Strout

177. “We are alone in these things that we suffer.”

— Elizabeth Strout

178. “I wonder how many people out there are able to be strong – or strong enough – because of the person they’re married to.”

— Elizabeth Strout

179. “This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.”

— Elizabeth Strout

180. “And when I found out that I had been living a parallel life, a dishonest life, it crushed me. But I have often thought that it made me a nicer person, I really do. When you are truly humbled, that can happen. I have come to notice this in life. You can become bigger or bitter, that is what I think. And as a result of that pain, I became bigger. Because I understood then how a woman could not know. It had happened, and it had happened to me.”

— Elizabeth Strout

181. “But it’s never starting over, Cindy, it’s just continuing on.”

— Elizabeth Strout

182. “Watching her, I felt she was telling the truth. There was something about her that seemed deeply – almost fundamentally – comfortable inside herself, the way I think a person is when they have been loved by their parents.”

— Elizabeth Strout

183. “Walking down the sidewalk I thought how my mother had never said I love you to me, and I thought how Chrissy had been going to call the baby Lucy. She loved me, my daughter! Even knowing this, I was surprised. In truth, I was amazed.”

— Elizabeth Strout

184. “My point is, if we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little.”

— Elizabeth Strout

185. “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.”

— Elizabeth Strout

186. “This authority was why I had fallen in love with William. We crave authority. We do. No matter what anyone says, we crave that sense of authority. Of believing that in the presence of this person we are safe.”

— Elizabeth Strout

187. “Sarah Payne said, If there is a weakness in your story, address it head-on, take it in your teeth and address it, before the reader really knows. This is where you will get your authority, she said, during one of those classes when her face was filled with fatigue from teaching. I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you. I feel that people may not understand: It was all right.”

— Elizabeth Strout

188. “There was for me during this time a sense of being dazed. As though, in a way, I was not capable of taking in everything that was happening in this world.”

— Elizabeth Strout

189. “These are broken people. Big difference between being a broken person and being evil. In case you don’t know. And if you don’t think everyone is broken in some way, you’re wrong. I’m telling you this because you have been so fortunate in your life, you probably don’t even know such broken people exist.”

— Elizabeth Strout

190. “God, I love young people,” Harmon said. “They get griped about enough. 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

191. “Her irritation with the world had dampened into a cushion of soft melancholy that went with her everywhere.”

— Elizabeth Strout

192. “Is he going to be okay?” I said he would most certainly be okay. I emphasized this, because I did not know myself – except what choice did he have, what choice do most of us have, except to be okay?”

— Elizabeth Strout

193. “Yet one has to wonder about the toll it takes, the lack of being touched or held. So many people are not.”

— Elizabeth Strout

194. “And she learned – freshly, scorchingly – of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn’t. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, “You’ll have another one.”

— Elizabeth Strout

195. “Everyone thinks like themselves, this is my point.”

— Elizabeth Strout

196. “She’s a bully, and bullies are always frightened.”

— Elizabeth Strout

197. “My childhood had been a lockdown.”

— Elizabeth Strout

198. “She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far. The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago.”

— Elizabeth Strout

199. “Lucy said, contemplatively, “I wonder how many people in long marriages live with ghosts beside them.”

— Elizabeth Strout

200. “Everyone has to feel like they matter.”

— Elizabeth Strout