25 Quotes by Alice Munro
Alice Munro is a Canadian writer known for her short stories that explore the complexities of human relationships and the human condition. She has won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, and is considered one of the greatest living writers in the English language. Munro's stories often center on the lives of women in rural Canada and explore themes such as identity, memory, and the search for meaning. (Bio)
Alice Munro Quotes
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.
The constant happiness is curiosity. (Meaning)
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. (Meaning)
One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one
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.
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.
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.
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 it altered by being viewed from these windows.
Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
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.
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.
The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
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.
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.
One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
― Alice Munro Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
