Alice Munro quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Alice Munro

Alice Munro Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Alice Munro on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?

My mother had a habit of hanging onto - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state.

Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls ... Even when they're being kind ... especially when they're being kind.

If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.

Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry.

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want?
It was too polite, I said.

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.

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.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

...the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging.

One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them.

One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.

The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame.

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.

Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid
it might as well be dead.

When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left

A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.

But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?

Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.

It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.

For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?

There were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.

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?

It's just life. You can't beat life.

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.

The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on.

None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade.

Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be.

A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks

Love is not for the undepilated.

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.

To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

And there was still a lot of soft snow in the bush. We

They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable.

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.

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.

My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.

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.

Shakespeare should have prepared her.

And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying.

Men. What they do. It's so sick and stupid. You can't believe it.

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.

Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.

That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,

The constant happiness is curiosity.

There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.

The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.

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.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

She would live now, not read.

Maybe the man in the moon will walk in here and fall in love with me and then I'll be all set!

That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting.

If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

Never in her life had this silly feeling of being enhanced by what she had put on herself.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

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.

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?

Her father was outraged. Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?

People who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one

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.

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?

They went bowling and curling and regularly joined other couples for coffee and doughnuts at Tim Horton's.

Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

this is not a story, only life.

Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.

Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity.

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.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds
this was a comfort to me.

Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

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.

Hector him like this from now on, when I could get him alone.

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.

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.

Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.

Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.

Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.

People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life.

Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful.

The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.

A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.