Alice Munro Quotes

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

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

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.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

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

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

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.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

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

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.

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.

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.

It’s just life. You can’t beat life.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

The constant happiness is curiosity.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

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

There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.

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

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.

People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.

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.

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

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.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She would live now, not read.

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

That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

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

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.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

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.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.

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

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

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