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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
Even
Burning
Somebody
Asks
House
Tell
Firsts
First
Manners
Country
Phones

More quotes by 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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Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Alice Munro
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Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
Alice Munro
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And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Alice Munro
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You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
Alice Munro
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Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
Alice Munro
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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
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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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For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.
Alice Munro
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I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.
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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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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Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
Alice Munro
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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
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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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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
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The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.
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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People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
Alice Munro
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The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
Alice Munro