Quote

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

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
Centered
Kept
Remember
Self
Never
People
Diaries

More quotes by Alice Munro

Image
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
Alice Munro
Image
I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
Image
They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
Alice Munro
Image
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
Image
Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
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
What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.
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
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
Image
I knew I would be famous one day. That's because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.
Alice Munro
Image
That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
Alice Munro