Quotes from Alice Munro

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

I know how you love this place, he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don't tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself I loved here - some self that I have finished with, and none too soon.

There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes, but it is up to us to make it come.

A hero worn out by his struggle, one who had sacrificed his youth—that was how he might present himself, not without effect. And it was true, in a way. He was physically brave, he had ideals, he was born a peasant and knew what it was to be despised. And she too, just now, had been despising him.

Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence, Everywhere an insult in your face. As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed, more of life.

The relatives didn't feel slighted—they had a limited interest in people like Roy who had just married into the family, and not even contributed any children to it, and who were not like themselves. They were large, expansive, talkative. He was short, compact, quiet.

The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities - see the humanity - in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware.

I went around the house to the back door thinking, I have been to a dance and a boy has walked me home and kissed me. It was all true. My life was possible.

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do? Remember

She barely notices when I say that I am going on to Toronto to visit my grandparents. Except to remark that they must be really old. Not a word about Alister. Not even a bad word. She would not have forgotten. Just tidied up the scene and put it away in a closet with her former selves. Or maybe she really is a person who can deal recklessly with humiliation.

The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.

Todo el mundo está cansado. Lo que pasa es que algunos aprenden a actuar como si no lo estuvieran.

Maybe it's an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can't help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn't such a muddle.

En su momento pensó que no podría vivir sin café, pero resulta que en realidad lo que quiere entre las manos es el tazón caliente; eso es lo que ayuda a pensar o a hacer lo que haga durante la sucesión de las horas, o de los días.

Porém ela sabia agora que havia épocas em que o feio e o bonito serviam exatamente para o mesmo propósito, quando qualquer coisa para a qual se olha é apenas um gancho onde pendurar as sensações descontroladas de seu corpo e os bocados e pedaços de sua mente.

I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.

Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize. I don't believe so.

E, ainda assim, uma euforia. A euforia indizível que se sente quando um desastre galopante guarda a promessa de libertar a pessoa de toda a responsabilidade de sua própria vida.

Children Katy's age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.

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.

They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was the thing most adults seemed to have.

I looked at the rusty-bottomed bread tin swiped too often by the dishcloth, and the pots sitting on the stove, washed but not put away, and the motto supplied by Fairholme Dairy: The Lord is the Heart of Our House. All these things stupidly waiting for the day to begin and not knowing that it had been hollowed out by catastrophe.

It occurred to him, and had occurred to him before, that there was after all something to be said for dealing with things the way most people of his age seemed to do. It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangement had altered.

I would often invent this dream for myself at the edge of sleep, and then it was strange how content it would make me, how it would make peace and consolation flow, and I would close my eyes and float on it into my real dreams which were never so kind [...].