Alice Munro Quotes

And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem ...

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housek...

Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-b...

I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to...

It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation

Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of ...

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

Children use that word "hate" to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened...It is n...

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the no...

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving f...

Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of ...

Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appre...

I don't think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel...

She smiled at me with such merriment of recognition, and such a yearning to be recognised in return,...

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

I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and ...

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and ...

Housework never really bothered me... what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be...

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

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there ha...

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you ...

If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn't bo...

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually u...

Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace stood in their doorway, ceremoniously, to watch me go, and I felt as i...

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, ...

Doing this was likewading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. ...

I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a c...

Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the ...

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

To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just h...

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

You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of t...

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say...

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood...

Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight ...

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we d...

I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. The...

She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then,...

Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further ever...

What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing...

A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but h...

It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt an...

This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, o...

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would neve...

Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callo...

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?

I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion,...

She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking ...

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourse...

A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a wh...

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes fr...

I was thinking about changing into a different sort of person than the one I am. I do think about th...