Top 100 Munro Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I couldn't choose a favourite author, but two contemporary writers who have never disappointed me are Tim Winton and Alice Munro.
Mariella Frostrup
#3. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
Nell Freudenberger
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The Life of Sir Thomas Munro, by the Rev. G. R. Gleig, in two volumes, a new edition (London, 1831), vol. ii, p. 175.
William Sleeman
#8. I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.
Ann Beattie
#9. As they say in Hollywood, that's a wrap! And the oscar goes to Tudor North and Tash Munro for an outstanding debut performance in a sex scene!
Tillie Cole
#10. I am damned,' thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.
Nick Cave
#11. 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
#12. The front of the man's kilt suddenly became very wet and Ian's eyes widened in surprise.
"Did he jsut piss in a Munro kilt?"
Ruairi smiled. "I think he did."
"The bastard has nay respect.
Victoria Roberts
#13. I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
Amy Waldman
#14. I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.
Nell Freudenberger
#15. Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.
Clark Blaise
#16. Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.
Cathleen Schine
#17. Fagan laughed. "See what ye have to look forward to, Munro? Ye better get used to that. Our women donna hesitate to put us in our place, and rightfully so."
"As long as that place is by Elizabeth's side, I donna mind.
Victoria Roberts
#18. Munro stood in the doorway, watching the two faeries peer into his fridge as thought it was the strangest thing they'd ever seen.
India Drummond
#19. 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
#20. William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.
Jennifer Haigh
#21. A hard pain it Munro's spine as it lurched into an awkward curve, arching his back off the surface where he lay. Muscles contracted, jerking and releasing, jerking and releasing. The calm voices grew insistent and frenzied, but in a controlled, orchestrated way.
India Drummond
#22. I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.
Emily Perkins
#23. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Amy Bloom
#24. When I was her age," Munro said to Eilidh, "I was chasing frogs."
Oron Chuckled. "When I was your age, I was chasing frogs. Come. We have things to discuss.
India Drummond
#25. Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
Julian Barnes
#26. My favorite short stories are by Alice Munro, especially her collections 'Carried Away' and 'Runaway.'
Hillary Clinton
#27. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
Cynthia Ozick
#28. Munro snorted. "So he's supposed to go down to the loch at half-crack o' the morning, paddle about in the frigid water for an hour or two, and then emerge? I'm finding it difficult to believe she'd see anything impressive."
Everyone laughed.
Tessa Dare
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.
Hector Hugh Munro
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
#35. 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
#36. He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
Alice Munro
#37. 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
#38. But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?
Alice Munro
#39. 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
#40. Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
Alice Munro
#41. Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Alice Munro
#42. The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Alice Munro
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Alice Munro
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.
Hector Hugh Munro
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,
Alice Munro
#63. 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
#64. I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
Alice Munro
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. No paradise is ever without its Serpent, nor any Eden its exiles.
Jennifer Munro
#74. 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
#75. Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan.
Alice Munro
#76. 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
#77. Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
Alice Munro
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.
Hector Hugh Munro
#82. 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
#83. Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.
Hector Hugh Munro
#84. It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.
Alice Munro
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
Alice Munro
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.
Alice Munro
#91. Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?
Alice Munro
#92. 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
#93. For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?
Alice Munro
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
Alice Munro
#98. She now belonged to two Doms. She was theirs for the taking, but also for the giving
Lila Munro
#99. 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
#100. The sight, sound or even smell of a first love seems to burrow deep into the brain.
Pete Munro
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