Top 100 Munro Quotes
#1. His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.
Alice Munro
#2. Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I've never been there, isn't that a good enough reason?
Alice Munro
#3. I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.
Hector Hugh Munro
#4. The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time.
Hector Hugh Munro
#5. I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough.
Alice Munro
#6. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
#7. All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be.
Alice Munro
#8. He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
Alice Munro
#9. Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.
Hector Hugh Munro
#10. But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?
Alice Munro
#11. You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.
Alice Munro
#12. Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
Alice Munro
#13. Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Alice Munro
#14. The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Alice Munro
#15. It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.
Hector Hugh Munro
#16. A reader of The Unspeakables recently contacted me. She said she had become so engrossed with the paperback she'd taken it to the top of a Munro whilst climbing on the Isle of Mull. I'm delighted to have three-dimensional circulation as well.
Peter F. Jemison
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Alice Munro
#21. Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.
Alice Munro
#22. 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
#23. Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.
Hector Hugh Munro
#24. He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep.
Hector Hugh Munro
#25. There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one's own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.
Hector Hugh Munro
#26. When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.
Hector Hugh Munro
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. A relative of mine ... spends his time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens. So patronising and irritating to teh Almighty, I should think.
Hector Hugh Munro
#31. There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.
Alice Munro
#32. I couldn't choose a favourite author, but two contemporary writers who have never disappointed me are Tim Winton and Alice Munro.
Mariella Frostrup
#33. You can wait as long as you like, pretty one, it won't make any difference. He will never see you as anything more than some victim he has to protect. Why he thinks it his duty to protect you from the inevitable, I do not know ... unless he knows something we do not ...
Charlotte Munro
#34. 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
#35. The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
Alice Munro
#36. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
Nell Freudenberger
#37. For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,
Alice Munro
#38. The secret o' health, happiness and success is deep breathing, buttermilk instead o' beer, your bedroom window open, a penny a week and a mind weel disciplined.
Neil Munro
#39. I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
Alice Munro
#40. Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.
Alice Munro
#41. 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
#43. Kings of the land and the sky we are; proud gryphons. Stalker stands, the epitome of pride. Naked and muscular, his wings widen and his feet dig in as if he alone holds down the earth and supports the heavens, keeping the two ever separate.
Elizabeth Munro
#44. 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
#45. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that, whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.
John Munro Woolsey
#46. Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?
Alice Munro
#47. 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
#48. It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.
Carol Windley
#49. No paradise is ever without its Serpent, nor any Eden its exiles.
Jennifer Munro
#50. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.
John Munro Woolsey
#51. Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan.
Alice Munro
#52. 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
#53. Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
Alice Munro
#54. 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
#55. How am I supposed to know? She just wants to do it. You wait. You'll see. She'll get you over there bawling and whining about what a bastard I am. One of these days.
Alice Munro
#57. Gram, you should have been a romance writer." Creighton wasn't her soul mate. The man was probably just lonely, living in such a remote area.
"You know, I might just give that a try. Just think, Effie Munro, erotic-romance author pens "hawt" stories from her beautiful Scottish estate.
Vonnie Davis
#58. Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.
Hector Hugh Munro
#59. If you live long enough as a parent, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn't bother to know about as well as the ones you do know about, all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don't think my father felt anything like this.
Alice Munro
#60. Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.
Hector Hugh Munro
#61. It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.
Alice Munro
#62. Maybe it's an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can't help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn't such a muddle.
Alice Munro
#63. I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.
Khaled Hosseini
#64. His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy.
Munro Leaf
#65. One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
Alice Munro
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.
Alice Munro
#69. Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?
Alice Munro
#70. There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.
Alice Munro
#71. For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?
Alice Munro
#72. All decent people live beyond their incomes; those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's; a few gifted individuals manage to do both.
Hector Hugh Munro
#73. He says the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?
Alice Munro
#74. 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
#75. Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
Alice Munro
#76. She now belonged to two Doms. She was theirs for the taking, but also for the giving
Lila Munro
#77. And in the sting and misery of his defeat, he began to chant loudly and defiantly the hymn of his threatened idol:
Sredni Vashtar went forth,
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.
Saki
#78. The sight, sound or even smell of a first love seems to burrow deep into the brain.
Pete Munro
#79. If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.
Hector Hugh Munro
#80. There's ten thousand wyes a hen can get into a gairden, but only the wan wye she can get oot, and it's gey ill for her to find it.
Neil Munro
#81. What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.
Alice Munro
#82. WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.
Alice Munro
#83. We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.
Hector Hugh Munro
#84. These relatives of hers, the Boles and the Jetters and the Pooles, used to be around the house a lot, or else Lea wanted to be at one of their houses. It was a clan that didn't always enjoy one another's company but who made sure they got plenty of it.
Alice Munro
#85. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
Alice Munro
#86. My mother had a habit of hanging onto - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state.
Alice Munro
#87. Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid
it might as well be dead.
Alice Munro
#88. A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.
Alice Munro
#89. I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.
Alice Munro
#90. 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
#91. The deceits which her spinster's sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children's hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.
Alice Munro
#92. A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.
Hector Hugh Munro
#93. 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
#94. In that light, philosophy is not so much
or not simply
'the love of wisdom,' but instead marks the passage from wonder as a noun to wonder as a verb. Philosophy is the love of wisdom to the extent that it remains an incitement to it.
Michael Munro
#96. Vagina man,' said Bunny, and his two colleagues went quiet and nodded in silent agreement.
Nick Cave
#97. If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.
Alice Munro
#98. My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
Alice Munro
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
