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All Quotes by author - Elizabeth Strout
" As a novelist, I like the contained drama and complexity of the courtroom, though I don't watch those shows on TV. I prefer the hospital shows because I wanted to be a doctor. "
Watch
Doctor
TV
" Bullies are just frightened people. "
Bullies
People
Just
" 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. "
Train
Reading
Loved
" 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. "
Love
People
Travel
" I don't ever really know where I get my characters from. "
Where
Really
Know
" I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me. "
Memory
Thinking
School
" I don't think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, 'I might do the dishes,' I don't. But then the dishes multiply. "
Just
Think
Then
" I don't think there's anybody I write about who I don't care for deeply in some way, no matter what their behavior is. "
Behavior
Think
Some
" I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write. "
Want
Always
Book
" 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. "
Walk
Live
Time
" 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. "
Kind
Surprise
Old
" 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. "
Me
Know
Hand
" If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it. "
Therapy
Talk
New York
" I got a gerontology certificate a million years ago along with my law degree, so I've been interested in older people for many years. Some people grow up with a lot of kids around, but I just grew up with a lot of old people. "
Law
Some People
Grow Up
" I grew up on a dirt road in Maine, and pretty much everybody on that dirt road was related to me, and they were old. And so grumpy. "
Dirt
Grumpy
Maine
" I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring. "
Work
Success
People
" 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. It's a job of tremendous anxiety for me. "
Fall
Love
Words
" 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. "
Audience
Right
Love
" I love the comfort of daily life's routines: things like being able to read a paper on the subway. It's no accident that my favourite word is 'quotidian.' "
Daily
Comfort
Life
" I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New Englanders, and so, in my writing, I've been drawn back there to the landscape and the light and the type of personality that's revealed. "
Light
Back
Writing
" I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it. "
I Am
Know
Love
" 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. "
Keep Going
Writing
World
" 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. "
Think
History
Kind
" In the kind of New England I'm from, you are expected to stay and marry somebody from New England - well, Maine, actually - so I think it was seen as a betrayal when I left for New York, which has been my refuge. "
Think
New York
Kind
" I sometimes miss the sense of excitement that I remember having when I was younger. I miss that sense of, 'Oh wow.' I think it's part of aging. "
Sometimes
Aging
Think
" I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different. "
Heart
Food
Kind
" 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. "
Prisons
Society
Law
" I was a pretty terrible lawyer. A really, really terrible lawyer. "
Terrible
Pretty
Lawyer
" My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it. "
Different
Elderly
Women
" My parents were very, very, very strict. "
Parents
Strict
Very
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