Elizabeth Strout Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.”
-- Elizabeth StroutSource : "The Authors' Roundtable". Interview with Jon Meacham, www.newsweek.com. June 26, 2009.
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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 StroutSource : Elizabeth Strout (2013). “Abide With Me”, p.209, Simon and Schuster
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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 -
“I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.”
-- Elizabeth Strout -
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“I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could feel it go. Perhaps it was nothing more than the two doughnuts expanding in her stomach full of milk, but Amy felt a heaviness begin, a familiar turning of some inward tide. As they drove over the bridge the sun seemed to move from a cheerful daytime yellow to an early-evening gold; painful how the gold light hit the riverbanks, rich and sorrowful, drawing from Amy some longing, a craving for joy.”
-- 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 StroutSource : Elizabeth Strout (2013). “The Burgess Boys”, p.261, Simon and Schuster
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“The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.”
-- Elizabeth StroutSource : Elizabeth Strout (2013). “The Burgess Boys”, p.268, Simon and Schuster
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“The appetites of the body were private battles.”
-- Elizabeth Strout -
“If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it.”
-- 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 -
“For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.”
-- Elizabeth Strout -
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“No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.”
-- 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 -
“The fact of the matter is I always have a really high sense of responsibility to the reader, whether it's a few readers that I get or a lot of readers, which I was lucky enough to get with 'Olive.' I feel responsible to them, to deliver something as truthful and straight as I can.”
-- 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 -
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“In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.”
-- Elizabeth Strout -
“I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.”
-- Elizabeth StroutSource : "Elizabeth Strout on 'The Burgess Boys'". Interview with Dylan Foley, www.chicagotribune.com. March 23, 2013.
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“I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.”
-- Elizabeth Strout -
“I don't want to live in Maine full time, but the physical beauty is very striking. It is the exact opposite of New York. When you walk through my small town to get a cup of coffee, you bump into five people you know.”
-- Elizabeth Strout -
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“I don't especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I've never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child.”
-- Elizabeth Strout -
“Traits don't change, states of mind do.”
-- Elizabeth StroutSource : Elizabeth Strout (2008). “Olive Kitteridge: Fiction”, p.33, Random House
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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 StroutSource : Elizabeth Strout (2008). “Olive Kitteridge: Fiction”, p.80, Random House
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“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.”
-- 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 -
“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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