Quote

Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.

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
Somebody
Asks
House
Tell
Firsts
First
Manners
Country
Phones
Even
Burning

More quotes by Alice Munro

Image
This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.
Alice Munro
Image
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.
Alice Munro
Image
His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.
Alice Munro
Image
Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance class.
Alice Munro
Image
Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
Alice Munro
Image
It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
Alice Munro
Image
It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
Alice Munro
Image
Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
Alice Munro
Image
I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
Alice Munro
Image
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
Alice Munro
Image
Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.
Alice Munro
Image
Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
Alice Munro
Image
People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
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
One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Alice Munro