Alice Munro Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

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

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

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

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
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
'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
She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days.

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

Alice Munro
People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

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

Alice Munro
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.

Alice Munro
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

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

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

Alice Munro
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
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
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
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

Alice Munro
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
This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.
The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.
This is what happens.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.

Alice Munro
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
I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.

Alice Munro
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