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The appetites of the body were private battles.

Elizabeth Strout

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Elizabeth Strout
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 6
Author
Novelist
Writer
Portland
Maine
Appetites
Battles
Appetite
Private
Battle
Body

More quotes by Elizabeth Strout

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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.
Elizabeth Strout
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Traits don't change, states of mind do.
Elizabeth Strout
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Bullies are just frightened people.
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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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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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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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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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
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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
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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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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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No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.
Elizabeth Strout
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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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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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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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Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything
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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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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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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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