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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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Elizabeth Strout
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 6
Author
Novelist
Writer
Portland
Maine
Contentment
Keys
Learned
Asks
Long
Never
More quotes by Elizabeth Strout
She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)
Elizabeth Strout
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
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
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
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
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
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
Traits don't change, states of mind do.
Elizabeth Strout
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
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
Bullies are just frightened people.
Elizabeth Strout
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
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
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
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
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
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
No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.
Elizabeth Strout
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
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
