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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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Elizabeth Strout
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: January 6
Author
Novelist
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Portland
Maine
Towns
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Afternoons
House
Elderly
Women
Cleaning
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Houses
First
Afternoon
Different
Town
Hated
More quotes by Elizabeth Strout
The key to contentment was to never ask why she had learned that long ago.
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
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
No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.
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
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
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
Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything
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
The appetites of the body were private battles.
Elizabeth Strout
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
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
Bullies are just frightened people.
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
She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)
Elizabeth Strout
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
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
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
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
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
