Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

No man runs the race until he sees the dream.

I am not going to believe in militant nationalism, which cultivates a culture of intolerance, Can't we think of a solution without violence.

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?

. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.

Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of.

No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.

I had no way to have a sense of humor about The Exorcist. I didn't know how. And this enabled me.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.

It's still pretty surreal. I wake up every day and just pinch myself and kind of think about how far I've come and all the stuff I have done.