Top 200 Elizabeth Strout Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Here is the thing that Cindy, for the rest of her life, would never forget: Olive Kitteridge said, “My God, but I have always loved the light in February.” Olive shook her head slowly. “My God,” she repeated, with awe in her voice. “Just look at that February light.”

— Elizabeth Strout

152. “She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven’t wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

159. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

161. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

163. “Don’t be scared of your hunger. If you’re scared of your hunger, you’ll just be one more ninny like everyone else.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

165. “Everyone needs to feel important.”

— Elizabeth Strout

166. “What am I going to do, Bob? I have no family.” “You have family,” Bob said. “You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That’s called family.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

168. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

170. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

179. “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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

181. “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

182. “He thought of all the people in the world who felt they’d been saved by a city. He was one of them. Whatever darkness leaked its way in, there were always lights on in different windows here, each light like a gentle touch on his shoulder saying, Whatever is happening, Bob Burgess, you are never alone.”

— Elizabeth Strout

183. “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

184. “But here was the world, screeching its beauty at her day after day, and she felt grateful for it.”

— Elizabeth Strout

185. “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

186. “I have never seen anything as beautiful as those girls. These women. My daughters!”

— Elizabeth Strout

187. “Who knows why people are different? We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

190. “What is it like to be you? I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person.”

— Elizabeth Strout

191. “Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as “big bursts” and “little bursts.” Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee’s, let’s say, or the waitress at Dunkin’ Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.”

— Elizabeth Strout

192. “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

193. “We all live with people – and places – and things – that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.”

— Elizabeth Strout

194. “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

195. “My childhood had been a lockdown.”

— Elizabeth Strout

196. “People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

198. “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

199. “I am not invisible no matter how deeply I feel that I am.”

— Elizabeth Strout

200. “We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through.”

— Elizabeth Strout