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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.

Elizabeth Strout

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Elizabeth Strout
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 6
Author
Novelist
Writer
Portland
Maine
Arms
Stand
Away
Around
Wanted
Acquaintance
Would
Beside
Like
Seemed
Darkness

More quotes by Elizabeth Strout

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Bullies are just frightened people.
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The appetites of the body were private battles.
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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)
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.
Elizabeth Strout
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No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.
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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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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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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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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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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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