Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Elizabeth Strout

Image
Bullies are just frightened people.
Elizabeth Strout
Image
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
Image
The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.
Elizabeth Strout
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Traits don't change, states of mind do.
Elizabeth Strout
Image
She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)
Elizabeth Strout
Image
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
Image
Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything
Elizabeth Strout
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Elizabeth Strout
Image
No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.
Elizabeth Strout
Image
The appetites of the body were private battles.
Elizabeth Strout
Image
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
Image
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.
Elizabeth Strout
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Elizabeth Strout