Alice Munro - People Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Alice Munro
People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

Alice Munro
What if people really did that - sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.

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

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

Alice Munro