Quote

I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.

Alice Munro

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Took
Antics
Attention
Despised
Much
Lofty
Would
Tender
Life
Romance
Seriously
Liked
Notion

More quotes by Alice Munro

Image
Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief.
Alice Munro
Image
She would live now, not read.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Alice Munro
Image
I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
Alice Munro
Image
The thing is to be happy, no matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.
Alice Munro
Image
Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.
Alice Munro
Image
There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
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
Image
And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Alice Munro