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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.

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
Long
Fiction
Something
Story
Way
Happens
Stories
Best
Fictions
Everything
Astonishing
Feel
Reader
Feels
Short

More quotes by 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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Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
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The constant happiness is curiosity.
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I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
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I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
Alice Munro
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It’s just life. You can’t beat life.
Alice Munro
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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.
Alice Munro
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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.
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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.
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I knew I would be famous one day. That's because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.
Alice Munro
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Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
Alice Munro
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Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.
Alice Munro
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The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
Alice Munro
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Peoples lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable-deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. . . . What I wanted [to write down] was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together-radiant, everlasting.
Alice Munro
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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.
Alice Munro
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people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one
Alice Munro
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He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
Alice Munro
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As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.
Alice Munro
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For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.
Alice Munro
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You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
Alice Munro