Alice Munro Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• 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

  Emotional, World, Unhappiness

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Mar 10, 2013

  9 Copy quote

• I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.

  Alice Munro

  Country, Ironic, Stories

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Dec 26, 2010

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Age, Sometimes, Hard

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Aug 31, 2014

  10 Copy quote

• She would live now, not read.

  Alice Munro

  "Gravel". www.newyorker.com. June 27, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Done, Realization, Rooms

  Alice Munro (1999). “The love of a good woman: stories”, Penguin, 1999

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Waiting, Problem, Turns

  "Alice Munro profile: The mistress of all she surveys" by Hephzibah Anderson, www.theguardian.com. May 30, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

• The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

  Alice Munro

  Stories, Way, I've Learned

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Oct 30, 2011

  7 Copy quote

• The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

  Alice Munro

  Lust, Everyday, Skins

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Sep 11, 2014

  4 Copy quote

• 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, Awkward, Only Child

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?

  Alice Munro

  Destiny, Air, Views

  Alice Munro (2014). “Open Secrets”, p.127, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• This is the day of wonders. The land is covered with trees like a head with hair and behind the ship the sun rises tipping the top trees with light. The sky is clear and shining as a china plate and the water playfully ruffled with wind. Every wisp of fog is gone and the air is full of the resinous smell of the trees. Seabirds are flashing above the sails golden like creatures from Heaven, but the sailors raise a few shots to keep them from the rigging.

  Alice Munro

  Smell, Light, Hair

  Alice Munro (2011). “New Selected Stories”, p.322, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.

  Alice Munro

  Book, Boys, Men

  Alice Munro (2010). “The View From Castle Rock”, p.226, Random House

  11 Copy quote

• If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Thinking, Somewhere Else

  Alice Munro (1999). “The love of a good woman: stories”, Penguin, 1999

  9 Copy quote

• There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.

  Alice Munro

  People, Forever, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alice Munro

  Memories, Writing, Anecdotes

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alice Munro

  Way, Sometimes, Straightforward

  9 Copy quote

• It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.

  Alice Munro

  Wind, Land, Mind

  Alice Munro (1990). “Friend of my youth: stories”, Alfred A. Knopf

  4 Copy quote

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

  Alice Munro

  Sparks, Wanted

  5 Copy quote

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

  Alice Munro

  Fall, Traps, Persons

  Alice Munro (2012). “Dear Life”, p.36, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I would ... go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. ... Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. ... If there were woman all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.

  Alice Munro

  Journey, Hair, Years

  11 Copy quote

• What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.

  Alice Munro

  Laughter, Compassion, Hilarity

  Alice Munro (2007). “Away from Her: Stories”

  4 Copy quote

• I knew I would be famous one day. That's because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, One Day, Would Be

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Alice Munro

  Art, Book, Reading

  Alice Munro (1974). “Something I've been meaning to tell you: thirteen stories”, Plume

  5 Copy quote

• I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.

  Alice Munro

  Care, Might, Saws

  Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.354, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

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