Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian author. The winner of 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, ... Wikipedia
“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway
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“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
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“Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.”
― Alice Munro
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“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, Away from Her
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“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
tags: books 70 people liked it like
“Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.”
― Alice Munro
tags: kindness, reconciliation 57 people liked it like
“Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?”
― Alice Munro
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“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”
― Alice Munro, Open Secrets
tags: parents, secrets, shame 49 people liked it like
“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, Too Much Happiness
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“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, Too Much Happiness
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“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, Runaway
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“If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman
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“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
tags: writing 33 people liked it like
“Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.”
― Alice Munro, The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose
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“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, Lives of Girls and Women
tags: first-impressions, love 30 people liked it like
“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, The Love of a Good Woman
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“He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. ”
― Alice Munro, Away from Her
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“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
― Alice Munro
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“People are curious. A few people are. ... 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.”
― Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth
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“My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
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“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, Runaway
17 people liked it like
“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
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“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
tags: life 16 people liked it like
“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, Dear Life: Stories
tags: forgiveness 15 people liked it like
“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
14 people liked it like
“He loved her for her wit, her cynicism, her deceptions. Less than lovable these seem to me now. They are both sly, Hugh and Margaret, they are socially awkward, easily embarrassed. But cold underneath, you may be sure, colder than us easy flirts with our charms and conquests. They do not reveal themselves. They will never admit to anything, never have to talk about anything, no, I could claw their skin and it would be my own fingers that would bleed. I could scream at them till my throat bursts and never alter their self-possession, change the look of their sly averted faces. Both blond, both easy blushers, both cold mockers. They have contempt for me. That is rubbish of course. Nothing for me. All for each other. Love.”
― Alice Munro
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“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
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“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, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: 13 Stories
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“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
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“Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.”
― Alice Munro
