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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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Alice Munro
Age: 94
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
Fear
Shadowy
Dream
Exam
Find
Lifelong
Would
Forgotten
Time
Building
Mistake
Wrong
Cataclysm
Understand
Flick
More quotes by Alice Munro
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.
Alice Munro
Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
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
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
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
Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
Alice Munro
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
Alice Munro
The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.
Alice Munro
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
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
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
A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
Alice Munro
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
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
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
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
He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
Alice Munro
In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
Alice Munro
Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Alice Munro
