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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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Elizabeth Strout
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 6
Author
Novelist
Writer
Portland
Maine
Facts
Really
Think
Thinking
Anybody
People
Interested
Close
Fact

More quotes by 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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She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)
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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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 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
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Traits don't change, states of mind do.
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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The appetites of the body were private battles.
Elizabeth Strout
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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The key to contentment was to never ask why she had learned that long ago.
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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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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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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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.
Elizabeth Strout