Elizabeth Strout

“...she feels her stomach turn choppy, whitecaps in her stomach.”

— Elizabeth Strout

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

“Only the young, he thought, could withstand the rigors of love.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

“This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

“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

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

— Elizabeth Strout

I grew up on a dirt road in Maine, and pretty much everybody on that dirt road was related to me, and…

— Elizabeth Strout

“Pain, like a pinecone unfolding, seemed to blossom beneath her breastbone.”

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

“You could buy a snow blower or a nice wool dress for your wife, but beneath it all people were rats scurrying…

— Elizabeth Strout

“Oh, she was a crazy woman, privately. Absolutely nuts. She was so mad at Jim O'Casey. She was so mad, she went…

— Elizabeth Strout

I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New…

— Elizabeth Strout

“Rebecca, standing at the window, felt a tiny smile inside her getting larger - how delicious it would be: one moment of…

— Elizabeth Strout

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…

— Elizabeth Strout

“She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far. The key to contentment was…

— Elizabeth Strout

I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I…

— Elizabeth Strout

“The truth is, Bob, they need those immigrants. Maine’s been losing its young people—you and I are a perfect case in point.…

— Elizabeth Strout

“So she way awake at night and at times there was a curious peacefulness to this, the darkness warm as though the…

— Elizabeth Strout

“She could not have predicted, no one can ever predict anything, that they’d have been raised at a time of protests and…

— Elizabeth Strout

“They’re not crazy. They’re exhausted. And partly they’re exhausted by people like you reading about the most inflammatory aspects of their culture…

— Elizabeth Strout

We all live on so many different levels and understandably present just a small portion of ourselves in most of our everyday…

— Elizabeth Strout

The evenings grew longer; kitchen windows stayed open after dinner and peepers could be heard in the marsh. Isabelle, stepping out to…

— Elizabeth Strout

By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could…

— Elizabeth Strout

“I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you could hear…

— Elizabeth Strout

“loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks…

— Elizabeth Strout

“What young people didn't know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young…

— Elizabeth Strout

“Isabelle's moods began to vary with alarming speed. She wondered if she had always been this way and simply failed to notice.…

— Elizabeth Strout

“And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in…

— Elizabeth Strout

“I mention this because there is the question of how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act…

— Elizabeth Strout

“I loved her,”I said. I did not say I loved her because she was good to my cousin Abel, good to me,…

— Elizabeth Strout

My parents were very, very, very strict.

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)

— Elizabeth Strout