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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.

Elizabeth Strout

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Elizabeth Strout
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 6
Author
Novelist
Writer
Portland
Maine
Every
Continued
Kind
Maps
Thinking
Thinks
World
Took
Wouldn
Persons
Person
Rebecca
Whole
Pins

More quotes by Elizabeth Strout

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In case you haven't noticed, people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because they can't stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it's okay we did whatever we did.
Elizabeth Strout
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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.
Elizabeth Strout
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I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.
Elizabeth Strout
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Bullies are just frightened people.
Elizabeth Strout
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The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.
Elizabeth Strout
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The appetites of the body were private battles.
Elizabeth Strout
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But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.
Elizabeth Strout
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No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.
Elizabeth Strout
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And it was too late. No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is.
Elizabeth Strout
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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.
Elizabeth Strout
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She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)
Elizabeth Strout
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The key to contentment was to never ask why she had learned that long ago.
Elizabeth Strout
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She remembered was hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed.
Elizabeth Strout
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My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it.
Elizabeth Strout
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Traits don't change, states of mind do.
Elizabeth Strout
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People like to think the younger generation's job is to steer the world to hell. But it's never true, is it? They're hopeful and good - and that's how it should be.
Elizabeth Strout
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Oh, gosh, Olive. I'm so embarrassed. No need to be, Olive tells her. We all want to kill someone at some point. (179)
Elizabeth Strout
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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.
Elizabeth Strout
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You have family, Bob said. You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family.
Elizabeth Strout
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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.
Elizabeth Strout