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

Alice Munro

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Alice Munro
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Wingham
Ontario
Alice Ann Munro
Alice Ann Laidlaw
Alice Ann Laidlaw Munro
Alice Laidlaw
Alice Anne Munro
Seems
Nothing
Mean
Complexity
Things
Chaos
Endless
Within
Simple
Easy

More quotes by Alice Munro

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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.
Alice Munro
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My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
Alice Munro
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Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
Alice Munro
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And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?
Alice Munro
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I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.
Alice Munro
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But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency which I as much as anybody else believed in.
Alice Munro
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The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
Alice Munro
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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.
Alice Munro
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Luck took me right out of myself - I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks' sake so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn't really look at anything. Well - this does.
Alice Munro
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Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance class.
Alice Munro
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It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.
Alice Munro
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It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.
Alice Munro
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There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.
Alice Munro
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You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
Alice Munro
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Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Alice Munro
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The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
Alice Munro
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I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.
Alice Munro
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She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.
Alice Munro
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Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
Alice Munro
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I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.
Alice Munro