Quotes from Alice Munro

The thing is to be happy, he said. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you're just there, going along easy in the world.

This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with.

Love is not for the undepilated.

He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.

I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story. [ A Conversation with Alice Munro , BookBrowse, 1998]

She hated to hear the word escape used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

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

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.

I actually had a long career as a flirt ahead of me. It's quite a natural behaviour, once the loss of love makes you give up your ideas of marriage.

There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc--that was the lost hope of girls.

In all my years in the town, I encountered no one who was divorced, and so it may be taken for granted that there were other couples living separate lives in one house, other men and women who had accepted the fact that there were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.

For later generations of women—post Sexual Revolution—enjoying sex was to become simply a duty, the perfect orgasm yet another thing to add to the list of required accomplishments; and when enjoyment becomes a duty, we're back in the land of "dreariness of spirit.

Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person's mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness.

Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft -- a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness -- however temporary, however flimsy -- of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.

If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.

Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be.

I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future.

Children use that word hate to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened...It is not physical harm that is feared...so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets.

It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee.

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

I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough.

Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied, "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way." Then