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Elizabeth Strout Biography

Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout (born January 6, 1956) is an American novelist and author. She is widely known for her works in literary fiction and her descriptive characterization. Born and raised in Portland, Maine, her experiences in her youth served as inspiration for her novels–the fictional "Shirley Falls, Maine" is the setting of four of her six novels.

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Elizabeth Strout Quotes

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.

Map, Maps, Thinking, Thinks, World

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.

Actors, Love, Mean, Sitting

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. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

Came, Feelings, Hung, Life, Person, Waiting

The evenings grew longer; kitchen windows stayed open after dinner and peepers could be heard in the marsh. Isabelle, stepping out to sweep her porch steps, felt absolutely certain that some wonderful change was arriving in her life. The strength of this belief was puzzling; what she was feeling, she decided, was really the presence of God.

Certain, Evenings, Feelings, Grew, Kitchen, Steps

Without a doubt my mother was an inspiration for my writing. This is true in many ways, but mostly because she is a wonderful storyteller, without even knowing it.

Doubt, Inspiration, Mother, True, Ways, Writing

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.

Book, Different, Old Friends, Reads, Sense, Surprise

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.

Child, Children, Different, Homesick, Like, People

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

Catholic, Everything, Guilty, Made, Maybe, Part

He put the blinker on, pulled out onto the avenue. "Well, that was nice," she said, sitting back. They had fun together these days, they really did. It was as if marriage had been a long, complicatd meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.

Back, Complicatd, Fun, Love, Nice

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.

Believe, Ideal, Part, Voice, Willing, Writing

Bullies are just frightened people.

Bullies, Bully, Frightened, People

I have to pay attention to what I have felt and observed, then push these responses to an extreme while keeping the story within the realm of being psychologically and emotionally true.

Attention, Emotionally, Extreme, Keeping, Pay, Stories

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.

Hands, Thing, Think, Thinking, Way, Writing

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

179, Gosh, Kill, Needs, Olives, Want

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.

Actually, Character, Characters, Order, Use

Back and forth she went each morning by the river, spring arriving once again; foolish, foolish spring, breaking open its tiny buds, and what she couldn’t stand was how—for many years, really—she had been made happy by such a thing. She had not thought she would ever become immune to the beauty of the physical world, but there you were. The river sparkled with the sun that rose, enough that she needed her sunglasses.

Breaking, Morning, Sparkled, Spring, Years

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. (211)

Increasingly, Person, Safety, Sea, World

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

Change, Don'T Change, Mind, States, Traits

I would hope that my readers feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance, at the endurance of love in the face of a variety of difficulties; that the quotidian life is not always easy, and is something worthy of respect.

Endurance, Face, Faces, Life, Love, Quality

And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.

Eye, Fingers, Groan, Kindness, Loneliness, Traffic

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