Quotes from Alice Munro

Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I've never been there, isn't that a good enough reason?

Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?

All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be.

A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks

Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after -- like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word

It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long, brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were.

Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.

The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.

The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything—and by "remember" she meant experience it in her mind, one more time—then store it away forever. This day's experience set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside.

People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life.

You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.

Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.

None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade.

What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.

It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.

I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.

When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said Oh-oh. Do you think you'll ever manage to get another one? If I'd objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.

He seemed happy. She thought that she seldom concerned herself about Laurence's being happy. She wanted him to be in a good mood, so that everything would go smoothly, but that was not the same thing.

When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified—no, frightened—by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity—that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends.

He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want? It was too polite, I said.

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.

there were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.

A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.