no ideology can protect a son from the unwelcome…

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

— Elizabeth Strout

“what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm…

— Elizabeth Strout

“I said on the phone to my mother, “I think I’m going to write the story of the Burgess kids.” “It’s a good one,”…

— Elizabeth Strout

“And she learned - freshly, scorchingly - of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into…

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

“The year that followed - was it the happiest year of his own life? He often thought so, even knowing that such a thing…

— Elizabeth Strout

I have to pay attention to what I have felt and observed, then push these responses to an extreme while keeping the story within…

— Elizabeth Strout

“She could hear in the darkness of her car how his breathing was quicker now; and her own was, too. She wanted to say…

— Elizabeth Strout

“Abdikarim shook his head in his darkened room, sweat coming from his face down onto his neck. “No, he cuts my heart. You didn’t…

— Elizabeth Strout

“she’d have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.”

— Elizabeth Strout

I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here.…

— Elizabeth Strout

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…

— Elizabeth Strout

“Why do you need everyone married?" Christopher has said to him angrily, when Henry has asked about his son's life. "Why can't you just…

— Elizabeth Strout

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

— Elizabeth Strout

I don't think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, 'I might do the dishes,'…

— Elizabeth Strout