Elizabeth Strout Quotes

It's amazing and sad what we have to do to survive sometimes.

Adventures are only interesting once you've lived to see the end of them. Before that, they are nothing but fear, and being too cold or too hot or too wet or too hungry, and getting hurt.

Life has to be dangerous.

I always have this image of a woman running across a desert carrying children, trying to find water and food, not knowing when they'll get that. And her feet are slashed up from the dry, hard earth... Even when I'm uncomfortable, sometimes in pain, or just cold... I think, 'Thank God for what I've got.'

The first few years in L.A. were really tough and scary, but I had to figure things out for myself.

When you're scared, when you're hanging on, when life is hurting you, then you're going to see what you're really made of.

Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

I had spent many days hungry; had slept on railway stations at times because I did not have money to pay for a hotel room... there were moments when I felt I had compromised my dignity as a human being and as an actor.

Necessity, which even makes cowards brave ...

Alarm in hard times makes one live; indulgence in comfort makes one die.

There is one good thing about reaching the bottom. When you get there, there's nothing left to do but fight your way back up or die.

I don't want to advise anyone to do anything, apart from try and stay alive. That's my advice - don't die.

For a lot of people, life's been pretty good. There hasn't been true terror right in your face.

Losing a game is not a tragedy after experiencing border raids and having to eat beetles because you are out of rations.

Watch your back, but more importantly when you get out the shower, dry your back. Its a cold world out there.

But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arm's length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest.

[You Got To Make It Through The World] it's kind of a survival song. Survival is what's happening and it's basically a song about that.

All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.

New York is just New York. It's a hard city, it's a hard city to live in. It's a desperate city. It's filled with scam artists and people who are always looking for a way in and a way out and the majority of people have to really negotiate their way through that jungle to get to the other side; the other side being a place of tranquility and peace and home and safety.

You're probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm.

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with a few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing...You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish

Don't you *ever* let go?" "I haven't yet." "Why?" "I suppose... because in this world, after everyone panics, there's always got to be someone to tip the wee out of the shoe.