Alice Munro Quotes

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”

“She would live now, not read.”

“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, and you're just there, going along easy in the world.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“It’s just life. You can’t beat life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things.”

“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.”

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

“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”

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

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

“For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief.”

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

“What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.”

“Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.”

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

“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.”

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

“The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.”

“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.”