Alice Munro Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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

Alice Munro
When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said "Oh-oh. Do you think you'll ever manage to get another one?" If I'd objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.

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

Alice Munro
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
Any woman who tells the truth about herself is a feminist.

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

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

Alice Munro
I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.

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

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

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

Alice Munro
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
There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women's domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.

Alice Munro
'The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.'

Alice Munro
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
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
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
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

Alice Munro
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
As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.

Alice Munro