Elizabeth Strout Quotes

Keeping a smile on your lips even when you're on the verge of tears. Feeling sorry for those who show their feelings.

Emotions are like passing storms, and you have to remind yourself that it won't rain forever. You just have to sit down and watch it pour outside and then peek your head out when it looks dry.

But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling.

A woman can put up with almost anything; anything but indifference.

The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.

We are always bargaining with our feelings so that we can live from day to day.

Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against the cold. For if you multiply your garments as the cold increases, that cold cannot hurt you; in the same way increase your patience under great offenses, and they cannot hurt your feelings.

Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

Emotions are wild horses. It is not explanations that carry us forward, but our will to go on.

It's cute how I used to think this 'barely holding it together' feeling was temporary.

Your present negative beliefs were formed by thought PLUS feelings. Generate enough emotion, or deep feeling and your new thoughts and ideas will cancel them out.

I do not intend to spare myself, not to avoid emotions or difficulties. I don't care much whether I live a longer or shorter time... the world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt toward it, because I have walked on this earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude I want to leave some souvenir.

To create something beautiful about despair or out of a feeling of despair is for me the most hopeful life affirming thing a person can do

When you're busy blocking out difficult emotions and feelings, you're not going to feel the good stuff, either.

A feeling can't kill you.

But he keeps his heart free of any feelings of hatred.

Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.

I've been ignoring my feelings lately. That works pretty well. Might also settle for less this week, just to try it out.

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.

Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does.

There's no "should" or "should not" when it comes to having feelings. They're part of who we are and their origins are beyond our control. When we can believe that, we may find it easier to make constructive choices about what to do with those feelings.

Feelings come and go, unless you don't feel them. Then they stay, and hurt, and grow pear-shaped and weird.

Negative feelings are like weeds. If you don't fully extract them (i.e. pull out the roots), they will come back.

You can smile when your heart is breaking because you're a woman.