Quotes from Alice Munro

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.

Algo había ocurrido allí. En la vida tienes unos cuantos sitios, o quizá uno solo, donde ocurrió algo, y después están todos los demás sitios.

Shakespeare should have prepared her.

I had once heard somebody say, at a party, that one of the nice things about marriage was that you could have real affairs – an affair before marriage could always turn out to be nothing but courtship.

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...

If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.

Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts.

But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?

Captain Tervitt had been a real captain, for many years, on the lake boats. Now he had a job as a special constable. He stopped the cars to let the children cross the street in front of the school and kept them from sledding down the side street in winter. He blew his whistle and held up one big hand, which looked like a clown's hand, in a white glove. He was still tall and straight and broad-shouldered, though old and white-haired. Cars would do what he said, and the children, too.

She didn't really plan to travel there. She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.

She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. 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.

La cuestión es ser feliz -dijo Neal-. A toda costa. Inténtalo. Se puede. Y luego cada vez resulta más fácil. No tiene nada que ver con las circunstancias. No te imaginas hasta qué punto funciona. Se aceptan las cosas y la tragedia desaparece. O pesa menos, en cualquier caso, y de pronto descubres que estás en paz con el mundo.

You remember your history?" He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, "Not altogether.

How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn't get hold of it at all. I

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

Una volta ragazze e ragazzi cercavano in ogni modo di apparire donne e uomini fatti, spesso con risultati ridicoli. Ora invece c'erano uomini e donne che cercavano di sembrare ragazzini finché, presumibilmente, un giorno si svegliavano a un passo dalla vecchiaia. (Marrakesh)

Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn't just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.

She sat with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face as if she'd been given a present she knew she would like, even if she hadn't got the wrapping off it yet.

Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful.

The deceits which her spinster's sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children's hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.

It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.

My mother had a habit of hanging onto - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state.

Her father was outraged. "Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?