Alice Munro Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”
-- Alice MunroSource : "Open Secrets". Book by Alice Munro, 1994.
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“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.”
-- Alice Munro -
“I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.”
-- Alice MunroSource : FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Oct 01, 2014
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“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 -
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“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.”
-- Alice MunroSource : FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Sep 04, 2014
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“She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn't altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn't shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men - people, everybody - thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she'd be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.”
-- 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 MunroSource : FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Nov 09, 2013
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“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 -
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“The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“People are curious. A few people are. ... 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 -
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“Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.”
-- Alice MunroSource : Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.232, Vintage
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“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
-- Alice MunroSource : Alice Munro (2013). “Runaway”, p.252, Random House
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“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.”
-- Alice Munro -
“There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.”
-- Alice Munro -
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“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.”
-- 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 MunroSource : "Go ask Alise". Interview with Newyorker, www.newyorker.com. February 19, 2001.
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“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 -
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“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 -
“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
-- 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 MunroSource : "Selected Stories, 1968-1994". Book by Alice Munro, 1996.
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“Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.”
-- Alice Munro -
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“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 -
“It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.”
-- Alice Munro -
“The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.”
-- Alice Munro -
“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 MunroSource : FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Nov 27, 2011
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“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 -
“That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.”
-- Alice Munro
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