Top 100 Munro's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer, or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride - he's my dad - and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.
Nick Cave
#3. Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
Alice Munro
#4. Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers. Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey's Scotch and Poodle's cocaine.
Nick Cave
#6. 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
#7. I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It's dealing with the material I'm inundated with that poses the problem.
Alice Munro
#8. I knew I would be famous one day. That's because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.
Alice Munro
#9. He seemed happy. She thought that she seldom concerned herself about Laurence's being happy. She wanted him to be in a good mood, so that everything would go smoothly, but that was not the same thing.
Alice Munro
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.
Hector Hugh Munro
#13. That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
Alice Munro
#14. My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
Alice Munro
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. My mother had a habit of hanging onto - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state.
Alice Munro
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
Alice Munro
#25. 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
#26. Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan.
Alice Munro
#27. His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.
Hector Hugh Munro
#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. Men. What they do. It's so sick and stupid. You can't believe it.
Alice Munro
#30. You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
Hector Hugh Munro
#31. 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
#32. They went bowling and curling and regularly joined other couples for coffee and doughnuts at Tim Horton's.
Alice Munro
#33. Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.
Alice Munro
#34. 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
#35. He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.
Alice Munro
#36. Sometimes that's just the way it is. You never really know until you try something on. The thing is," she said, with a new, more moderate conviction
Alice Munro
#37. Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.
Hector Hugh Munro
#38. 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
#39. There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.
Alice Munro
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.
Alice Munro
#43. Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls ... Even when they're being kind ... especially when they're being kind.
Alice Munro
#44. Let's see, what've we got for the little girl to eat? Nothing, I hoped, but he brought a tin of Christmas candies, which seemed to have melted then hardened then melted again, so the colored stripes had run. They had a taste of nails.
Alice Munro
#45. 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
#46. Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I'm writing now, in spite of his troll's name, because this is not a story, only life.
Alice Munro
#47. 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
#48. Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.
Hector Hugh Munro
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them.
Alice Munro
#52. Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
Alice Munro
#53. 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
#54. Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.
Hector Hugh Munro
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Alice Munro
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Alice Munro
#64. Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Alice Munro
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?
Alice Munro
#68. 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
#69. He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
Alice Munro
#70. 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
#71. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.
Hector Hugh Munro
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,
Alice Munro
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
Alice Munro
#88. 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
#89. No paradise is ever without its Serpent, nor any Eden its exiles.
Jennifer Munro
#90. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
Nell Freudenberger
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I couldn't choose a favourite author, but two contemporary writers who have never disappointed me are Tim Winton and Alice Munro.
Mariella Frostrup
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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