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

More quotes by 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.
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Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
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Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
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You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
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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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Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
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I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.
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The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Alice Munro
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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.
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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
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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
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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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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
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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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She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.
Alice Munro
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Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
Alice Munro
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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
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Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
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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One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
Alice Munro