Top 100 Alice Munro Quotes
#1. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
#2. The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Alice Munro
#3. All these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center.
Alice Munro
#4. I was young, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm.
Alice Munro
#5. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
Alice Munro
#6. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Alice Munro
#7. How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn't get hold of it at all. I
Alice Munro
#8. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.
Alice Munro
#9. They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
Alice Munro
#10. The relatives didn't feel slighted - they had a limited interest in people like Roy who had just married into the family, and not even contributed any children to it, and who were not like themselves. They were large, expansive, talkative. He was short, compact, quiet.
Alice Munro
#11. People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people
Alice Munro
#12. For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,
Alice Munro
#13. I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
Alice Munro
#14. For later generations of women - post Sexual Revolution - enjoying sex was to become simply a duty, the perfect orgasm yet another thing to add to the list of required accomplishments; and when enjoyment becomes a duty, we're back in the land of dreariness of spirit.
Alice Munro
#15. My sister and I didn't know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn't what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty. "Purse. Purse stolen," said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.
Alice Munro
#16. Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation ... subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to ...
Alice Munro
#17. Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn't waste the milk.
Alice Munro
#18. Corrie said she was glad that what they were doing - what they had just done - appeared not to bother him, in spite of his belief. She said that she herself had never had any time for God, because her father was enough to cope with.
Alice Munro
#19. It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.
Alice Munro
#20. I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.
Alice Munro
#21. Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied, "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way." Then
Alice Munro
#22. It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better.
Alice Munro
#23. Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
Alice Munro
#24. A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.
Alice Munro
#25. Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
Alice Munro
#26. The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather - a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart.
Alice Munro
#27. I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Alice Munro
#28. I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
Alice Munro
#29. That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
Alice Munro
#30. Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.
Alice Munro
#32. Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.
Alice Munro
#33. You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Alice Munro
#34. It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love ... the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.
Alice Munro
#35. Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
Alice Munro
#36. The Shubert grandparents. No comfort there. He in uniform, she in a ball gown, displaying absurd self-satisfaction. They had got what they wanted, Sophia supposed, and had only contempt for those not so conniving or so lucky.
Alice Munro
#37. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace stood in their doorway, ceremoniously, to watch me go, and I felt as if I were a ship with their hope on it, dropping down over the horizon.
Alice Munro
#38. Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
[A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]
Alice Munro
#39. To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.
Alice Munro
#40. It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.
Alice Munro
#41. Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
Alice Munro
#42. The final four works are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.
Alice Munro
#43. The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
Alice Munro
#44. I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
Alice Munro
#45. She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store ... He had not even had time to get into the store ...
Alice Munro
#46. It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading.
The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.
Alice Munro
#47. Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
Alice Munro
#48. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.
Alice Munro
#49. None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade.
Alice Munro
#50. Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
Alice Munro
#51. One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them.
Alice Munro
#52. Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
Alice Munro
#53. How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.
Alice Munro
#54. There were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.
Alice Munro
#55. The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
Alice Munro
#56. She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
Alice Munro
#57. Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person's mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness.
Alice Munro
#58. This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time
you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.
Alice Munro
#59. Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
Alice Munro
#60. Life is always so full. Getting and spending we lay waste to our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do?
Alice Munro
#61. It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation
Alice Munro
#62. Children Katy's age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.
Alice Munro
#63. If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.
Alice Munro
#64. It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee.
Alice Munro
#65. I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.
Alice Munro
#66. Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
Alice Munro
#67. I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere ... I go into it, and
move back and forth
and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more
like a house.
Alice Munro on reading.
Alice Munro
#68. The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
Alice Munro
#69. They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was the thing most adults seemed to have.
Alice Munro
#70. He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want?
It was too polite, I said.
Alice Munro
#71. He could no more describe the feeling he got from her than you can describe a smell. It's like the scorch of electricity. It's like burnt kernels of wheat. No, it's like a bitter orange. I give up.
Alice Munro
#72. They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy
Alice Munro
#73. Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.
Alice Munro
#74. And there was still a lot of soft snow in the bush. We
Alice Munro
#76. So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.
Alice Munro
#77. There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive.
Alice Munro
#78. That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting.
Alice Munro
#79. She hoped he wouldn't ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would be taken as drearily typical.
Alice Munro
#80. And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Alice Munro
#81. People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life.
Alice Munro
#82. Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
Alice Munro
#83. They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable.
Alice Munro
#85. The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
Alice Munro
#86. ...the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging.
Alice Munro
#87. What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee.
Alice Munro
#88. It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote
the world I created
as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
Alice Munro
#89. A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.
Alice Munro
#90. Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.
Alice Munro
#91. People who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one
Alice Munro
#92. I slipped the envelope into it, there in the wide lower corridor of the Arts Building with people passing me on the way to classes, on the way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room. On their way to deeds they didn't know they had in them.
Alice Munro
#93. You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
Alice Munro
#94. In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.
Alice Munro
#95. She sat with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face as if she'd been given a present she knew she would like, even if she hadn't got the wrapping off it yet.
Alice Munro
#96. Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft
a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.
Alice Munro
#97. Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Alice Munro
#98. Men. What they do. It's so sick and stupid. You can't believe it.
Alice Munro
#99. Hector him like this from now on, when I could get him alone.
Alice Munro
#100. He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying.
Alice Munro
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