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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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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
Longer
Full
Secret
Easy
Communicable
Feelings
Blown
Believe
Secrets
People
Defined
Recognize

More quotes by Alice Munro

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People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
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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People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
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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Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
Alice Munro
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The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
Alice Munro
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I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.
Alice Munro
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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
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Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
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Things have changed, ofcourse. There are counsellors at the ready. Kindness and understanding. Life is harder for some, we're told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imgainery. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non recipient, as the case may be. But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.
Alice Munro
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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
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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
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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.
Alice Munro
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It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
Alice Munro
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I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
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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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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That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
Alice Munro
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Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
Alice Munro
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I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.
Alice Munro