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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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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
House
Tell
Firsts
First
Manners
Country
Phones
Even
Burning
Somebody
Asks

More quotes by 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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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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I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
Alice Munro
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Luck took me right out of myself - I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks' sake so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn't really look at anything. Well - this does.
Alice Munro
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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
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You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Alice Munro
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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
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Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
Alice Munro
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He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
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
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The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
Alice Munro
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She would live now, not read.
Alice Munro
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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
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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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And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
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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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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I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
Alice Munro
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I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
Alice Munro
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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