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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)

Elizabeth Strout

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Elizabeth Strout
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 6
Author
Novelist
Writer
Portland
Maine
Sometimes
Sea
Every
Became
Life
Needed
Olive
Like
Working
Olives
World
Sense
Desperately
Persons
Increasingly
Person
Terror
Hard
Safety

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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.
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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.
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Traits don't change, states of mind do.
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The appetites of the body were private battles.
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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.
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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.
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Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.
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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.
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He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.
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She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)
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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.
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You surely know that in the course of a long marriage it is not unusual for a husband or a wife to develop a crush on someone else.
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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)
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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.
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The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.
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Bullies are just frightened people.
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Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything
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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.
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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.
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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.
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