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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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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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They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
Alice Munro
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There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.
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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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 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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His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.
Alice Munro
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In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
Alice Munro
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Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
Alice Munro
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One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Alice Munro
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In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.
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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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
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When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said Oh-oh. Do you think you'll ever manage to get another one? If I'd objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.
Alice Munro
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Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.
Alice Munro
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Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
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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What if people really did that - sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.
Alice Munro
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Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Alice Munro
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The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
Alice Munro