Alice Munro Quotes - Page 2

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.

Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.

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.

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.

Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

In dreams you can have the feeling that you've had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it's really nothing that simple. You know that there's a whole underground system that you call 'dreams,' having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar - where you are now, where you've always been.

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.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.

She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn't altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn't shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men - people, everybody - thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she'd be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.

Naturally my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by "feminist." In the beginning I used to say, well, of course I'm a feminist. But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not. I think I'm a feminist as far as thinking that the experience of women is important. That is really the basis of feminism.

Things have changed, ofcourse. There are counsellors at the ready. Kindness and understanding. Life is harder for some, we're told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imgainery. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non recipient, as the case may be. But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.