Alice Munro Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Naturally my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by "feminist." In the beginning I used to say, well, of course I'm a feminist. But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not. I think I'm a feminist as far as thinking that the experience of women is important. That is really the basis of feminism.

  Alice Munro

  Mean, Writing, Men

  4 Copy quote

• Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.

  Alice Munro

  Country, Phones, House

  Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.359, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.

  Alice Munro

  Fighting, Silence, Facts

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Jan 16, 2017

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Horse, Loss, Rising

  Alice Munro (2013). “The Love Of A Good Woman”, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

  Alice Munro

  Pride, Self, Faces

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Aug 04, 2011

  18 Copy quote

• Things have changed, ofcourse. There are counsellors at the ready. Kindness and understanding. Life is harder for some, we're told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imgainery. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non recipient, as the case may be. But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.

  Alice Munro

  Kindness, Blow, Understanding

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Absurd, Feels

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Nov 18, 2010

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Travel, Long, Way

  Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.429, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

• Peoples lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable-deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. . . . What I wanted [to write down] was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together-radiant, everlasting.

  Alice Munro

  Wall, Pain, Writing

  8 Copy quote

• As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.

  Alice Munro

  Wall, Believe, Men

  Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart (2003). “No Love Lost”, New Canadian Library

  8 Copy quote

• There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.

  Alice Munro

  Believe, House, Limits

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from May 29, 2011

  8 Copy quote

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

  Alice Munro

  Thinking, Answers, Changed

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, Thinking, Years

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Sep 16, 2010

  9 Copy quote

• Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

  Alice Munro

  Believe, People, Feelings

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Aug 28, 2016

  4 Copy quote

• There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Trying, Stories

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Makeup, Forgiving, Relief

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

  9 Copy quote

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

  Alice Munro

  Simple, People, Kitchen

  "Lives of Girls and Women". Book by Alice Munro, 1971.

  7 Copy quote

• It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Important, World

  9 Copy quote

• And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?

  Alice Munro

  Coffee, Men, Thinking

  Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart (2003). “No Love Lost”, New Canadian Library

  4 Copy quote

• Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.

  Alice Munro

  Notebook, Writing, Long

  8 Copy quote

• For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Years, Practice

  "Canada's Alice Munro, 'master' of short stories, wins Nobel Prize in literature" By Joe Sterling, Ben Brumfield, www.cnn.com. October 10, 2013.

  6 Copy quote

• I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.

  Alice Munro

  Dream, Mistake, Finding Yourself

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

  7 Copy quote

• I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

  Alice Munro

  Self, People, Diaries

  "On "Dear Life": An Interview with Alice Munro". Interview with Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. November 20, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

  Alice Munro

  Book, Reading, Dust

  Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.587, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.

  Alice Munro

  Flower, Home, Eye

  Alice Munro (2002). “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories”, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

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