Quotes from Alice Munro

She would have said that love was hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant postration

For some reason he thinks of Diane in her unbecoming red ski jacket and decides that her life is her life, there is not much use worrying about it. And he thinks of his wife, pretending to laugh at the television. Her quietness.

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/?

Durante mucho tiempo te desprendes del pasado con facilidad y de una forma que parece automática y adecuada. Las escenas del pasado, más que desvanecerse, dejan de tener importancia. Y entonces se produce una brusca vuelta atrás, lo que está acabado y bien acabado resurge de repente, requiere tu atención, incluso que hagas algo al respecto, aunque salte a la vista que no se puede hacer nada.

this is not a story, only life.

I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion, a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily and bountifully that even if it is rejected he can move along as buoyantly as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that, inexperienced as I was. Just a person who took comfort in the moment and in a sort of reasonable façade of life.

He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying.

The stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, with a paler purple flower, and stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce, skin-piercing and inflaming spines. Those would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow.

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.

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

for since Munro's chosen form is the short story, her overriding theme is brevity—look now, act now, contemplate now, because soon, very soon, this thing that involves you will be over.

It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better.

We had a hard life but we didn't know it...We had power....it's a power of transformation you have, when you're stuffed full of fear and eagerness - not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it.

She thought that when she went with Peter to an engineers' party, the atmosphere was pleasant though the talk was boring. That was because everybody had their importance fixed and settled at least for the time being. Here nobody was safe. Judgment might be passed behind backs, even on the known and published. An air of cleverness or nerves obtained, no matter who you were.

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

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind," her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. "When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.

I had been in love all year, or at least since the first week in September, when a boy named Martin Collingwood had given me a surprised, appreciative, and rather ominously complacent smile in the school assembly. I never knew what surprised him; I was not looking like anybody but me; I had an old blouse on and my home-permanent had turned out badly.

Alas he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man.

The final four works are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.

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.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind,' her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. 'When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are the other places, which are just other places.

Y Doree se preguntó por qué tenía que importarle lo que Maggie pensara. Maggie era una extraña, ni siquiera se sentía a gusto con ella. Fue Lloyd quien lo dijo, y tenía razón.