256 Quotes by Elizabeth Strout

Dottie was not a woman to complain, having been taught by her decent Aunt Edna one summer – it seemed like a hundred years ago, and practically was – that a complaining woman was like pushing dirt beneath the fingernails of God, and this was an image Dottie had never been able to fully dislodge.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic – you were made to feel guilty about everything.

Do not ever think you are better than someone, I will not tolerate that in my classroom, there is no one here who is better than someone else, I have just witnessed expressions on the faces of some of you that indicate you think you are better than someone else, and I will not tolerate that in my classroom, I will not.

In a way, I’m very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It’s the oldest state, and it’s the whitest state.

But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union – what pieces life took out of you. Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude – and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.

We were not as close as you might expect; we were equally friendless and equally scorned, and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we viewed the rest of the world.

Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don’t. I’m not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.

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!

I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you could hear outside in the open air-when the conditions were exactly right-the corn growing in the fields of my youth... You cannot hear my heart breaking, and I know that part is true, but to me, they are inseparable, the sound of growing corn and the sound of my heart breaking.