Elizabeth Strout Quotes

That's how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.

It's amazing how much distance one truth can create between two people.

Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.

I think that a lot of times, I trust people I shouldn't, and it turns out right, and it makes me feel a little better about it.

It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then you fшnd out you hardly know them at all.

What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

I think transitions are never that noticeable, but they are always on their way. It has to do with distance and accessibility. People call it mellowing, but I think it's how available you are toward other people, or how much you distance yourself.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.

I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren't good for you.

If you treat an animal right, they don't run away. They're not like us. They run away from people they don't trust; most times we run away from ourselves.

Friendship is anything that you get something out of that is very, very important to you. And that's why there are those people who are so close to you that you don't know how you'd live without them. And they are the ones that, even if they do something terrible, you have to keep. Otherwise, you're just going to be lost without them.

I could add her to the long list of people I didn't understand.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

Parents don't know their children at all. No one knows anyone, in fact.

In this world, there was nothing scarier than trusting someone. But there was also nothing more rewarding.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.

It is only out of ignorance that people are cruel, because they really don't think it will come back.

We had lain together, skin on skin, been as close as two people could, and he was a stranger. He was that someone who you are afraid of as a child, stranger. They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

The majority of people have no understanding of the things with which they daily meet, nor, when instructed, do they have any right knowledge of them, although to themselves they seem to have.