“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
“Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.”
— Alice Munro
“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”
— Alice Munro
“I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion, a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily and bountifully that even if it is rejected he can move along as buoyantly as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that, inexperienced as I was. Just a person who took comfort in the moment and in a sort of reasonable façade of life.”
— 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
“I was thinking about changing into a different sort of person than the one I am. I do think about that. 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. What has Cam ever done that actually hurt me, anyway, as Haro once said. And how am I better than he is after the way i felt the night Mother lived instead of died? I made a promise to myself i would try.I went over there one day taking them a bakery cake – which Cam eats now as happily as anyone else – and I heard their voices out in the yard – now it’s summer, they love to sit in the sun – Mother saying to some visitor, “Oh, yes I was, I was all set to take off into the wild blue yonder, and Cam here, this idiot, came and danced outside my door with a bunch of his hippie friends – ‘ ‘My God, woman,’ roared Cam, but you could tell he didn’t care now, ‘members of an ancient holy discipline.” I had a strange feeling, like I was walking n coals and trying a spell so I wouldn’t get burnt. Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts”
— Alice Munro
“It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation”
— Alice Munro
“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.”
— Alice Munro
“Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.”
— Alice Munro
“Children use that word “hate” to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened…It is not physical harm that is feared…so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets.”
— Alice Munro
“Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence, like dancing and nice dinners–something that shouldn’t interfere with people’s being kind and cheerful to each other.”
— Alice Munro
“It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee.”
— Alice Munro
“Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories– the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.”
— Alice Munro
“I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds–this was a comfort to me.”
— Alice Munro
“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?”
— Alice Munro
“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.”
— Alice Munro
“I began to understand that there were certain talkers–certain girls–whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people–people like me–who didn’t concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.”
— Alice Munro
“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.”
— Alice Munro
“I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.”
— Alice Munro
“I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”
— Alice Munro
“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
“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…”
— 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