Quotes from Elizabeth Strout

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.

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.

No one in this world comes from nothing.

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

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

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.

'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.

I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me.

Bullies are just frightened people.

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

I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.

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.

I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts.

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

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

It's just that I'm the kind of person," Rebecca continued, "that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn't be a pin for me.

I suspect I said nothing because I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don't know they have embarrassed themselves. I do this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time.

My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, "Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along.

Oh that's lovely," said Bunny. "Olive, you've got a date." "Why would you say something so foolish?" Olive asked, really annoyed. "We're two lonely people having supper." "Exactly," said Bunny. "That's a date.

Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was.

Oh, gosh, Olive. I'm so embarrassed." "No need to be," Olive tells her. "We all want to kill someone at some point." (179)