Quotes by 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.

Every year, when youre a child, you become a different person.

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.

She smiled at me with such merriment of recognition, and such a yearning to be recognised in return, that you would think this was a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.

Its not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, Read, but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, Dont read, dont think, just write, and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If youre going to be a writer youll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think There must be something else people do, you wont quite be able to quit.

Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace stood in their doorway, ceremoniously, to watch me go, and I felt as if I were a ship with their hope on it, dropping down over the horizon.

If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didnt bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself.

She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking to new people, living among hordes of people every day who were not Clark.A life, a place, chosen for that specific reason––that it would not contain

Doing this was likewading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement thatyou were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion—calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain ofthe cold continued to wash into your body.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

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

A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles.Cant you tolerate people being different, why is this so important?If this isnt important, nothing is.The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went to bed speechless, parted speechless the next morning, and during the day were overtaken by fear - hers that he would never come home, his that when he did she would not be there. Their luck held, however. They came together in the late afternoon pale with contrition, shaking with love, like people who had narrowly escaped an earthquake and had been walking around in naked desolation.

I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didnt go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.

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.

This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with.

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

Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

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

Housework never really bothered me... what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life... when youre a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isnt the fact that you do the laundry.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.