256 Quotes by 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. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.

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.

Traits don’t change, states of mind do.

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.

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.

And – I know the defensiveness in this sentence – my parents and my sister and my brother never wrote me, or called me, and when I called them it was always hard; I felt I heard in their voices anger, a habitual resentment, as though they were silently saying You are not one of us, as though I had betrayed them by leaving them.

Both of them laughed until they had tears in their eyes, and even then they kept on laughing. But Mary thought: Not one thing lasts forever; still, may Angelina have this moment for the rest of her life.

I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.

Personality disorder? Given the extensive and widespread array of human emotions, why was anything a personality disorder?