Alice Munro Quotes

The constant happiness is curiosity.

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

A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.

Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.

The thing is to be happy, 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, you're just there, going along easy in the world.

That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.

One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

It’s just life. You can’t beat life.

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.