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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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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
People
Meanness
Underestimate
Souls
Especially
Soul
Even
Kind
Never
More quotes by Alice Munro
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.
Alice Munro
My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
Alice Munro
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.
Alice Munro
Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
Alice Munro
There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.
Alice Munro
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
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Alice Munro
You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
Alice Munro
And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Alice Munro
Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
Alice Munro
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
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
Alice Munro
That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
Alice Munro
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.
Alice Munro
It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.
Alice Munro
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
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.
Alice Munro
I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.
Alice Munro
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.
Alice Munro
