Elizabeth Strout quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Elizabeth Strout on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

Bullies are just frightened people.

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.

That happens in hotel rooms, people have bad dreams.

boys. Defense attorneys for the whole crappy world." Bob's new apartment

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.

I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.

It was a sad moment. There are sad moments in life, and this was one of them.

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

I mention this because there is the question of how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act in it. How,

Her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do. A

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.

People, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side

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.

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

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

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

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

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

I was a pretty terrible lawyer. A really, really terrible lawyer.

It was Henry's nature to listen, and many times during the week he would say, 'Gosh, I'm awful sorry to hear that, ' or 'Say, isn't that something?

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.

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

I thought how when I got out of the hospital I would never again walk down the sidewalk without giving thanks for being one of those people,

People know exactly who loves them, and how much ...

I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.

No ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome inheritance of his father's ambitions.

I grew up on a dirt road in Maine, and pretty much everybody on that dirt road was related to me, and they were old. And so grumpy.

My mother did not like Unitarians; she thought they were atheists who didn't want to be left out of the fun of Christmas,

with the group of Somali men who gathered

the young, he thought, could withstand the rigors of love.

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

The purpose of fiction is not to make people seem nice. What makes anyone think people are nice? Look around you!

There is that constant judgment in this world: How are we going to make sure we do not feel inferior to another?

So - you're a writer. You're an artist.

Each of his son's had been his favorite child.

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

... and that was when I learned that work gets done if you simply do it.

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.

Say the word, even now I can barely stand to

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

At the end of the day, he said, "I will take care of you," his voice thick with emotion. She stood before him and nodded. He zipped her coat for her.

Driving, Lambright thought the moon looked like a fingerprint of chalk.

one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren't just moments, they were gifts.

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.

No one in this world comes from nothing.

that - I would remember the view from the hospital window and be glad for the sidewalk I was walking on. To

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

He thought of all the people in the world who felt they'd been saved by a city. He was one of them.

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.

Something on his, and he held up a hand to indicate

A yearning stirred in him that was not sexual but a kind of reaching toward her simplicity of form. He

She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at ths age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.

The privacy of sorrow.

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

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

She knows that loneliness can kill people - in different ways can actually make you die. (68)

He hated dishonesty-- or lack of courage-- more than anything.

A person can only move forward, she thinks. A person should only move forward.

How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right." I

My parents were very, very, very strict.

She always played his song because whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of air.

stopped coming home for lunch. He just stayed in his office

the sense of apology did not go away; it was a tiring thing to carry. -

society's been drugging its women for years

I see." I didn't see, though. How do we ever see something about our own self?

She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)

He looked at the books, and she wanted to say, 'Stop that,' as though he were reading her diary.

God, I'm scared,' he said, quietly. She almost said, 'Oh, stop. I hate scared people.

You just stood up to your mother ... I should think now you could take on the world.

I don't think there's anybody I write about who I don't care for deeply in some way, no matter what their behavior is.

How can people in California have problems with their feet?" asks Molly moving around Olive with a plate of sandwiches. "Don't they drive everywhere?

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.

Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately.

She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far.

Well, widow-comforter, how is she?" Olive spoke in the dark from the bed.
"Struggling," he said.
"Who isn't?

we are free of each other, and yet not, and never will be.

she'd have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.

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.

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.

'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.

Because we all love imperfectly.

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.

No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

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

constructions, and I

I sometimes miss the sense of excitement that I remember having when I was younger. I miss that sense of, 'Oh wow.' I think it's part of aging.

If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it.

So life goes on, I thought. (And now I think: It goes on, until it doesn't.)

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.

cell phone. He gave her more water, told her to drink it slowly, then began leading her back the way they had come; her legs were

I loved New York for this gift of endless encounters.

So much of life seems speculation.

Work gets done if you simply do it.

Nothing is long ago.

To listen to a person is not passive.

It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning.

The appetites of the body were private battles.