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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

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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
Things
Called
Clear
Reading
Less
Read
Afterwards
Art
Seemed
Back
Loving
Book
Went

More quotes by Alice Munro

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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
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I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.
Alice Munro
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My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
Alice Munro
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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
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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
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The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
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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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
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Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
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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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
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And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Alice Munro
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Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
Alice Munro
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She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
Alice Munro
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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
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You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Alice Munro
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Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
Alice Munro
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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
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People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
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