Alice Munro Quotes
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".
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.
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?
I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
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.
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.
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.
Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
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.
Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.
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...
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
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.
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.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.
Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final s
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid and have it taken from you.
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.
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.
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?
I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me.
