Elizabeth Strout quotes

Elizabeth Strout is an American author acclaimed for her insightful novels exploring small-town life and complex human relationships. Her books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Olive Kitteridge," have captivated readers with their emotional depth and vivid characters. She continues to be recognized as a powerful voice in contemporary American literature. Here are 35 of her quotes:

I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.

Elizabeth Strout

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

Elizabeth Strout

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

Elizabeth Strout

But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.

Elizabeth Strout

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.

Elizabeth Strout

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.

Elizabeth Strout

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.

Elizabeth Strout

I don't especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I've never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child.

Elizabeth Strout

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.

Elizabeth Strout

I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.

Elizabeth Strout

It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.

Elizabeth Strout

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.

Elizabeth Strout

I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.

Elizabeth Strout

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.

Elizabeth Strout

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.

Elizabeth Strout

Bullies are just frightened people.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

I don't want to live in Maine full time, but the physical beauty is very striking. It is the exact opposite of New York. When you walk through my small town to get a cup of coffee, you bump into five people you know.

Elizabeth Strout

For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.

Elizabeth Strout

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

Elizabeth Strout

I love the comfort of daily life's routines: things like being able to read a paper on the subway. It's no accident that my favourite word is 'quotidian.'

Elizabeth Strout