Alice Munro Quotes

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

— Alice Munro

“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

“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

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

— Alice Munro

“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.”

— Alice Munro

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

— Alice Munro

“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

“I began to understand that there were certain talkers
certain girls
whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people
people like me
who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.”

— Alice Munro

“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

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

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

— Alice Munro

“This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time
you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.”

— Alice Munro

I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: Well, lucky I can do anything at all.

— Alice Munro

Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation ... subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to ...

— Alice Munro

“All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be.”

— Alice Munro

“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 didn't go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.”

— Alice Munro

“He could no more describe the feeling he got from her than you can describe a smell. It's like the scorch of electricity. It's like burnt kernels of wheat. No, it's like a bitter orange. I give up.”

— Alice Munro

“So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.”

— Alice Munro

Long after all the chocolates were eaten, and the cousins had gone, we kept the chocolate-box in the linen-drawer in the dining-room sideboard, waiting for some ceremonial use that never presented itself. It was still full of the empty chocolate cups of dark, fluted paper. In the wintertime I would sometimes go into the cold dining room and sniff at the cups, inhaling their smell of artifice and luxury; I would read again the descriptions on the map provided on the inside of the box-top: hazelnut, creamy nougat, Turkish delight, golden toffee, peppermint cream.

— Alice Munro

“My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.”

— Alice Munro

“Corrie said she was glad that what they were doing-what they had just done-appeared not to bother him, in spite of his belief. She said that she herself had never had any time for God, because her father was enough to cope with.”

— Alice Munro

“He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.”

— Alice Munro

“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

If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.

— Alice Munro

“Fiona had never learned her mother's language and she had never shown much respect for the stories that it preserved-the stories that Grant had taught and written about, and still did write about, in his working life. She referred to their heroes as "old Njal" or "old Snorri." But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris's trip, and Auden's. She didn't really plan to travel there. She said the weather was too dreadful. Also-she said-there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for-but never did get to see.”

— Alice Munro

“I have been incredibly lucky," he said. "Lucky in my life. Oh, I know some people would not say so. They'd say I hadn't stuck with anything, or that I hadn't made any money. They'd say I wasted that time when I was down-and-out. But that's not true.
"I heard the call," he said, raising his eyebrows, half smiling at himself. "Seriously. I did. I heard the call to get out of the box. Out of the got-to-do-something-big box. Out of the ego box.”

— Alice Munro

“Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories
the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.”

— Alice Munro

“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.
[A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]”

— Alice Munro

“Chess worked for a wholesale grocery firm. He had thought of being a history teacher, but his father had persuaded him that teaching was no way to support a wife and get on in the world. His father had helped him get this job but told him that once he got in he was not to expect any favors. He didn't. He left the house before it was light, during this first winter of our marriage, and came home after dark. He worked hard, not asking that the work he did fit in with any interests he might have had or have any purpose to it that he might have once honored. No purpose except to carry us both toward that life of lawnmowers and freezers which we believed we had no mind for. I might marvel at his submission, if I thought about it. His cheerful, you might say gallant, submission.
But then, I thought, it's what men do.”

— Alice Munro

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people

— Alice Munro

“Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn't just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.”

— Alice Munro

“Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful.”

— Alice Munro

“MY MOTHER PRAYED on her knees at midday, at night, and first thing in the morning. Every day opened up to her to have God's will done in it. Every night she totted up what she'd done and said and thought, to see how it squared with Him. That kind of life is dreary, people think, but they're missing the point. For one thing, such a life can never be boring. And nothing can happen to you that you can't make use of. Even if you're wracked by troubles, and sick and poor and ugly, you've got your soul to carry through life like a treasure on a platter.”

— Alice Munro

“Children use that word "hate" to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened ... It is not physical harm that is feared ... so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets.”

— Alice Munro

“She hoped he wouldn't ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would be taken as drearily typical.”

— Alice Munro

“He described to her the house he had built for himself, in outside appearance a shack, but delightful inside, at least to him. A sleeping loft with a little round window. Everything he needed right where he could put his hand to it, out in the open, nothing in cupboards. A short walk from the house he had a bathtub sunk in the earth, in the middle of a bed of sweet herbs. He would carry hot water to it by the pailful and lounge there under the stars, even in the winter. He grew vegetables, and shared them with the deer.
(From the story "Powers")”

— Alice Munro

“For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.”

— Alice Munro

“Hector him like this from now on, when I could get him alone.”

— Alice Munro

“She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but *presumptuous*. She had to try to see herself, then, as somebody who could be /made happy/. The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundle of her
was that something that could just be picked up and /made happy/?”

— Alice Munro

“When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left”

— Alice Munro

“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.”

— Alice Munro

“They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy”

— Alice Munro

“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.”

— Alice Munro

“The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on.”

— Alice Munro

“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

“I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.”

— Alice Munro

“In dreams you can have the feeling that you've had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it's really nothing that simple. You know that there's a whole underground system that you call 'dreams,' having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar - where you are now, where you've always been.”

— Alice Munro

“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

“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

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

— Alice Munro