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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
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“Bob was not a young man, and he knew about loss. He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of release. He was not an especially contemplative person, and he did not dwell on this. But by October there were many days when the swell of rightness, loose-limbedness, and gentle gravity came to him. It recalled to him being a child, when he found one day he could finally color within the lines.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“But every town had been promising. Every place at first had said, Here you go- You can live here. You can rest here. You can fit. The enormous skies of the Southwest, the shadows that fell over the desert mountains, the innumerable cacti- red-tipped, or yellow-blossomed, or flat-headed- all this had lightened him when he first moved... ...But as with them all, the same hopeful differences--...-- they all became places that sooner or later, one way or another, assured him that he didn't, in fact, fit.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning.”
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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“She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“He looked at the books, and she wanted to say, 'Stop that,' as though he were reading her diary.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Awful to think she was a disapproving mother. Awful to wonder-had she always frightened Amy? Is that why the girl had grown up so fearful, always ducking her head? It was bewildering to Isablle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious. But it was a terrible feeling. More terrible than having Avery Clark forget to come to her house. Knowing that her child had grown up frightened. Except it was cockeyed, all backwards, because, thought Isabelle, glancing back at her daughter, I've been frightened of you.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“The appetites of the body were private battles.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“A person can only move forward, she thinks. A person should only move forward.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child - that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else's home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one's own.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Speaking of this, he felt something had been returned to him, as though the inestimable losses of life had been lifted like a boulder, and beneath he saw - under the attentive gaze of Daisy's blue eyes - the comforts and sweetness of what had once been.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“She always played his song because whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of air.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes, because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere in the room.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Traits don't change, states of mind do.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“A lot of people don't have families. . . . . But they still have homes.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Oh that's lovely," said Bunny. "Olive, you've got a date.""Why would you say something so foolish?" Olive asked, really annoyed. "We're two lonely people having supper.""Exactly," said Bunny. "That's a date.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.”
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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“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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“And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Back and forth she went each morning by the river, spring arriving once again; foolish, foolish spring, breaking open its tiny buds, and what she couldn’t stand was how—for many years, really—she had been made happy by such a thing. She had not thought she would ever become immune to the beauty of the physical world, but there you were. The river sparkled with the sun that rose, enough that she needed her sunglasses.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“It’s just that I’m the kind of person," Rebecca continued, "that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing though each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“There were days - she could remember this - when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Silly little plastic belt, made for a skinny pinny; it could barely tie around her. She managed, though - a tiny white bow. Waiting, she folded her hands and realized how every single time she went by this hospital, the same two thoughts occurred to her: that she'd been born here and that her father's body had been brought here after his suicide. She'd been through some things, but never mind. She straightened her back. Other people had been through things, too.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“We're two lonely people having supper.""Exactly." said Bunny. "That's a date.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Rebecca, standing at the window, felt a tiny smile inside her getting larger - how delicious it would be: one moment of perfect joy, propped up and righteous with booze, to let that first punch fly.”
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 could hear in the darkness of her car how his breathing was quicker now; and her own was, too. She wanted to say their hears were too old for this now; you can't keep doing this to a heart, can't keep expecting your heart to pull through.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“God, I love young people," Harmon said. "They get griped about enough. 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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“Each of his son's had been his favorite child.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“But Henry was pretty irritating himself, with his steadfast way of remaining naive, as though life were just what a Sears catalogue told you it was: everyone standing around smiling.”
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.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Why do you need everyone married?" Christopher has said to him angrily, when Henry has asked about his son's life. "Why can't you just leave people alone?"He doesn't want people alone.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“At the end of the day, he said, "I will take care of you," his voice thick with emotion. She stood before him and nodded. He zipped her coat for her.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Well, widow-comforter, how is she?" Olive spoke in the dark from the bed. "Struggling," he said. "Who isn't?”
Elizabeth Strout
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“The year that followed - was it the happiest year of his own life? He often thought so, even knowing that such a thing was foolish to claim about any year of one's life: but in his memory, that particular year held the sweetness of a time that contained no thoughts of a beginning and no thoughts of an end..”
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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“What young people didn't know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly . . . No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't chose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not know what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered. . . . But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union--what pieces life took out of you.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats--then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water--seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below 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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“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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“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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“She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people.”
Elizabeth Strout
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“All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)”
Elizabeth Strout
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“She knows that loneliness can kill people - in different ways can actually make you die. (68)”
Elizabeth Strout
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“Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn't want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer. (45)”
Elizabeth Strout
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“But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union--what pieces life took out of you.”
Elizabeth Strout
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