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Alice Munro Quotes

Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction", or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov." Munro is the recipient of many literary accolades, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the contemporary short story", and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. She is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction and was the recipient of the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award, as well as the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. July 1931  •  Other names Άλις Μανρό, Элис Манро
Alice Munro photo

Works

Too Much Happiness
Runaway
Runaway
Alice Munro
The Moons of Jupiter
Too Much Happiness
Runaway
Runaway
Alice Munro
The Moons of Jupiter
Alice Munro: 38 quotes42 likes

Famous Alice Munro Quotes

“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 Munro

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”

Alice Munro

“She would live now, not read.”

Alice Munro

Source: Dear Life: Stories

“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.”

Alice Munro

Dear Life (2012)

“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.”

Alice Munro book Lives of Girls and Women

Source: Lives of Girls and Women

“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 book The Moons of Jupiter

Source: The Moons of Jupiter

Alice Munro Quotes about people

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

Alice Munro

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

Alice Munro

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

Alice Munro book Lives of Girls and Women

Source: Lives of Girls and Women

“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 Munro book Runaway

Source: Runaway (2004)
Context: This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.
The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.
This is what happens.
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.”

Alice Munro

Alice Munro Quotes about life

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

Alice Munro

Source: Away from Her

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

Alice Munro

Source: Away from Her

“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 Munro book Too Much Happiness

Source: "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

“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 book Too Much Happiness

Source: "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

Alice Munro Quotes

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

Alice Munro

&quot;Friend of My Youth&quot;, in Friend of My Youth https://books.google.com/books?id=JHO0R0im-WsC&amp;pg=PT94 (1990) <br class="br">Context: People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. 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.<br>And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong.

“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 book Too Much Happiness

Source: "Too Much Happiness", in Too Much Happiness (2009)

“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

Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014 (2014)
Source: Away from Her

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

Alice Munro book Open Secrets

Source: Open Secrets (1994)

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

Alice Munro

Source: The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose

“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.”

Alice Munro book The Love of a Good Woman

Source: The Love of a Good Woman

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

Alice Munro book Too Much Happiness

Source: Too Much Happiness

“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".”

Alice Munro book Runaway

Source: Runaway

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

Alice Munro book Too Much Happiness

Source: Too Much Happiness

“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 Munro

Source: Dear Life: Stories

“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 book Too Much Happiness

Source: Too Much Happiness

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

Alice Munro

Source: Dear Life: Stories

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

Alice Munro

Source: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

“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.”

Alice Munro book Vintage Munro

Source: Vintage Munro

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

Alice Munro

Source: The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose

“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

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

Alice Munro book The Moons of Jupiter

Source: The Moons of Jupiter

“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.”

Alice Munro book Selected Stories

Selected Stories, 1968-1994 (1996)

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