Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Alice Munro, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Alice Munro quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 206 Alice Munro quotes for you to read and share.

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Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said - that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question. -- Alice Munro
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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
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It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness
however temporary, however flimsy
of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another. -- Alice Munro
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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
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I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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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
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One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning. -- Alice Munro
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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
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One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing. -- Alice Munro
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And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence.
'If I loved you I would have written differently. -- Alice Munro
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She would have said that love was hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant postration -- Alice Munro
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But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency which I as much as anybody else believed in. -- Alice Munro
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Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls ... Even when they're being kind ... especially when they're being kind. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee. -- Alice Munro
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The constant happiness is curiosity. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind ... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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She would live now, not read. -- Alice Munro
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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
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My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information. -- Alice Munro
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In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward. -- Alice Munro
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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
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He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want?
It was too polite, I said. -- Alice Munro
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Love is not for the undepilated. -- Alice Munro
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Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry? -- Alice Munro
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I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future. -- Alice Munro
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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
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When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left -- Alice Munro
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For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel, -- Alice Munro
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Shakespeare should have prepared her. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word 'escape' used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about. -- Alice Munro
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She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort. -- Alice Munro
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A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else. -- Alice Munro
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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
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Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly. -- Alice Munro
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The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming. -- Alice Munro
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The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. -- Alice Munro
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You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never. -- Alice Munro
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What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given. -- Alice Munro
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I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes. -- Alice Munro
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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
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Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later. -- Alice Munro
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If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true. -- Alice Munro
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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
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Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be. -- Alice Munro
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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
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I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same. -- Alice Munro
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If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man. -- Alice Munro
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She started off with an inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran downhill. In the first place she could never find a pattern to suit her. It was no wonder; there were no patterns made to match the ideas that blossomed in her head. -- Alice Munro
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For some reason he thinks of Diane in her unbecoming red ski jacket and decides that her life is her life, there is not much use worrying about it. And he thinks of his wife, pretending to laugh at the television. Her quietness. -- Alice Munro
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This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with. -- Alice Munro
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Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets. -- Alice Munro
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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
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My mother had a habit of hanging onto - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state. -- Alice Munro
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Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid
it might as well be dead. -- Alice Munro
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For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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They went bowling and curling and regularly joined other couples for coffee and doughnuts at Tim Horton's. -- Alice Munro
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To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb. -- Alice Munro
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I know how you love this place, he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don't tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself I loved here - some self that I have finished with, and none too soon. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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A million dollars in those days was a million dollars. -- Alice Munro
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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
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To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin. -- Alice Munro
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I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing. -- Alice Munro
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Her father was outraged. Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself? -- Alice Munro
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But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place? -- Alice Munro
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He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. -- Alice Munro
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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
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None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade. -- Alice Munro
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Life would be grand if it weren't for the people. -- Alice Munro
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I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life - things will probably happen in your life - that will make this seem minor. Other things you'll be able to feel guilty about. -- Alice Munro
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Never in her life had this silly feeling of being enhanced by what she had put on herself. -- Alice Munro
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this is not a story, only life. -- Alice Munro
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And there was still a lot of soft snow in the bush. We -- Alice Munro
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Certain suggestions, or notions, would make the muscles of her lean spotty face quiver, her eyes go sharp and black, and her mouth work as if there was a despicable taste in it. She could stop you in your tracks then, like a savage thornbush. -- Alice Munro
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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
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Hector him like this from now on, when I could get him alone. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity. -- Alice Munro
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I would often invent this dream for myself at the edge of sleep, and then it was strange how content it would make me, how it would make peace and consolation flow, and I would close my eyes and float on it into my real dreams which were never so kind [ ... ]. -- Alice Munro
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People who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one -- Alice Munro
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Maybe the man in the moon will walk in here and fall in love with me and then I'll be all set! -- Alice Munro
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The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail. -- Alice Munro
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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
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For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity? -- Alice Munro
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But I hope you will
use your brains. Use your brains. Don't be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being
distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does. -- Alice Munro
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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
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It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore. -- Alice Munro
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What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever. -- Alice Munro
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Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about. -- Alice Munro
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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
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He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee. -- Alice Munro
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I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds
this was a comfort to me. -- Alice Munro
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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
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A hero worn out by his struggle, one who had sacrificed his youth - that was how he might present himself, not without effect. And it was true, in a way. He was physically brave, he had ideals, he was born a peasant and knew what it was to be despised. And she too, just now, had been despising him. -- Alice Munro
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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
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They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy -- Alice Munro
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...the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging. -- Alice Munro
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Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now? -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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
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You remember your history?" He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, "Not altogether. -- Alice Munro
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Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful. -- Alice Munro
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He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into. -- Alice Munro
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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
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And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in? -- Alice Munro
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We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do
we do it all the time. -- Alice Munro
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A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape. -- Alice Munro
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The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable. -- Alice Munro
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Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies? -- Alice Munro
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She smiled at me with such merriment of recognition, and such a yearning to be recognised in return, that you would think this was a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand. -- Alice Munro
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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
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It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation -- Alice Munro
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There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done. -- Alice Munro
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You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing. -- Alice Munro
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Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire. -- Alice Munro
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That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings. -- Alice Munro
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The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life. -- Alice Munro
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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
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The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame. -- Alice Munro
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My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache. -- Alice Munro
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And now such a warm commotion, such busy love. -- Alice Munro
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The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on. -- Alice Munro
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It's just life. You can't beat life. -- Alice Munro
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One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them. -- Alice Munro
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Men. What they do. It's so sick and stupid. You can't believe it. -- Alice Munro
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Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan. -- Alice Munro
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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
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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
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I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people. -- Alice Munro
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The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other
I with words, Hugh with silence
for being each other. We never needed any more than that. -- Alice Munro
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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
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You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations. -- Alice Munro
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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
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Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry. -- Alice Munro
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People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life. -- Alice Munro
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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
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Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness. -- Alice Munro
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He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying. -- Alice Munro
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Alas he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man. -- Alice Munro
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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
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Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. -- Alice Munro
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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
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Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person. -- Alice Munro
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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
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That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting. -- Alice Munro
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Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are. -- Alice Munro
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The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple. -- Alice Munro