Quote

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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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
Light
Believed
Decency
Enough
Ideals
Thoroughly
Disastrously
Much
Anybody
Proved
Unfailingly
Never
Short
Dishes
Reorganization
Came
Household
Haphazard
Clear
Failed
Cleaned
Else
Fell
Cleanliness
Order
Ideal
Disgrace

More quotes by Alice Munro

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Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
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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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
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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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I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.
Alice Munro
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Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.
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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Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
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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Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.
Alice Munro
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That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
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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She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.
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
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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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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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He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
Alice Munro
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Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
Alice Munro
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The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
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