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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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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
Trying
Away
Explosives
Kind
Moments
Gathered
Stories
Tension
Everything
Novel
Right
Getting
Feel
Story
Feels
Moment
Writing
Write
Explosive
More quotes by Alice Munro
What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.
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
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
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
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
Alice Munro
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
Alice Munro
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.
Alice Munro
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
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Alice Munro
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
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
For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.
Alice Munro
The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.
Alice Munro
He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
Alice Munro
And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Alice Munro
Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
Alice Munro
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
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
Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Alice Munro
So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.
Alice Munro
