Munro Quotes

Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan. ~ Alice Munro

Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

She barely notices when I say that I am going on to Toronto to visit my grandparents. Except to remark that they must be really old. Not a word about Alister. Not even a bad word. She would not have forgotten. Just tidied up the scene and put it away in a closet with her former selves. Or maybe she really is a person who can deal recklessly with humiliation. ~ Alice Munro

The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books - even those who were hung-over, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending - should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too. ~ Alice Munro

The stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, with a paler purple flower, and stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce, skin-piercing and inflaming spines. Those would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow. ~ Alice Munro

Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

The cat is domestic only as far as suits its own ends ... ~ Hector Hugh Munro

It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was, like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain there unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay, ~ Alice Munro

When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified - no, frightened - by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity - that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends. ~ Alice Munro

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

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you. ~ Jincy Willett

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing. ~ Alice Munro

Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness. ~ Alice Munro

The secret o' health, happiness and success is deep breathing, buttermilk instead o' beer, your bedroom window open, a penny a week and a mind weel disciplined. ~ Neil Munro

But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that, whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. ~ John Munro Woolsey

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think 'There must be something else people do,' you won't quite be able to quit. ~ Alice Munro

Children Katy's age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever. ~ Alice Munro

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

She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days. ~ Alice Munro

Maybe it's an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can't help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn't such a muddle. ~ Alice Munro

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

Vagina man,' said Bunny, and his two colleagues went quiet and nodded in silent agreement. ~ Nick Cave

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

Fiona had never learned her mother's language and she had never shown much respect for the stories that it preserved-the stories that Grant had taught and written about, and still did write about, in his working life. She referred to their heroes as "old Njal" or "old Snorri." But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris's trip, and Auden's. She didn't really plan to travel there. She said the weather was too dreadful. Also-she said-there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for-but never did get to see. ~ Alice Munro

And so it often happened with those practical people. In spite of their calculations, their survival instincts, they might not get as far as they had quite reasonable expected. ~ Alice Munro

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people ~ Alice Munro

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind ... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her. ~ Alice Munro

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning. ~ Alice Munro

I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future. ~ Alice Munro

The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world. ~ Alice Munro

So it wasn't Peggy I was interested in, not her tears, her crumpled looks. She reminded me too much of myself. It was her comforters I marvelled at. How they seemed to bow down and declare themselves in front of her.
What had they been saying? Nothing in particular. All right, they said. It's all right, Peggy, they said. Now, Peggy. All right. All right.
Such kindness. That anybody could be so kind.
It is true that these young men, brought to our country to train for bombing missions on which so many of them would be killed, might have been speaking in the normal accents of Cornwall or Kent or Hull or Scotland. But to me they seemed unable to open their mouths without uttering some kind of blessing, a blessing on the moment. It didn't occur to me that their futures were all bound up with disaster, or that their ordinary lives had flown out the window and smashed on the ground. I just thought of the blessing, how wonderful to get on the receiving end of it, how lucky and undeserving was that Peggy. ~ Alice Munro

this is not a story, only life. ~ Alice Munro

The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He's been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It's not a matter of one tree after another, it's all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back.
There's another name for the bush, and this name is stalking around in his mind, in and out of where he can almost grasp it. But not quite. It's a tall word that seems ominous but indifferent. ~ Alice Munro

A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape. ~ Alice Munro

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class. ~ Alice Munro

You live more in five minutes on a bike like this going flat out than some people live in a lifetime. ~ Burt Munro

Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire. ~ Alice Munro

A reader of The Unspeakables recently contacted me. She said she had become so engrossed with the paperback she'd taken it to the top of a Munro whilst climbing on the Isle of Mull. I'm delighted to have three-dimensional circulation as well. ~ Peter F. Jemison

All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be. ~ Alice Munro

As they say in Hollywood, that's a wrap! And the oscar goes to Tudor North and Tash Munro for an outstanding debut performance in a sex scene! ~ Tillie Cole

To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb. ~ Alice Munro

Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I'm writing now, in spite of his troll's name, because this is not a story, only life. ~ Alice Munro

The man is a common murderer. A common murderer, possible, but a very uncommon cook. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever. ~ Alice Munro

I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life - things will probably happen in your life - that will make this seem minor. Other things you'll be able to feel guilty about. ~ Alice Munro

Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft
a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her. ~ Alice Munro

On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

As a matter of fact she does not know to this day if those words were spoken, or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continual, changing pressures that it seemed more than two arms were needed, that she was surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he was telling her she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go."
"Passion ~ Alice Munro

Georgia took once a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.
Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out.
The course was not a total loss, because Georgia and the instructor ended up living together. ~ Alice Munro

Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off? ~ Alice Munro

In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring. ~ John Munro Woolsey

She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn't altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn't shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men - people, everybody - thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she'd be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever. ~ Alice Munro

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people. ~ Alice Munro

Find yourself a cup of tea, the teapot is behind you. Now tell me about hundreds of things. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied, "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way." Then ~ Alice Munro

Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after
like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word ~ Alice Munro

In dreams you can have the feeling that you've had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it's really nothing that simple. You know that there's a whole underground system that you call 'dreams,' having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar - where you are now, where you've always been. ~ Alice Munro

Kings of the land and the sky we are; proud gryphons. Stalker stands, the epitome of pride. Naked and muscular, his wings widen and his feet dig in as if he alone holds down the earth and supports the heavens, keeping the two ever separate. ~ Elizabeth Munro

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies? ~ Alice Munro

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

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing. ~ Carol Windley

I always say beauty is only sin deep. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere ... I go into it, and
move back and forth
and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more
like a house.
Alice Munro on reading. ~ Alice Munro

The relatives didn't feel slighted - they had a limited interest in people like Roy who had just married into the family, and not even contributed any children to it, and who were not like themselves. They were large, expansive, talkative. He was short, compact, quiet. ~ Alice Munro

The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal. ~ Alice Munro

The Australian backyard was once built for tradesmen and outdoor toilets. As suburbs spread, it became a playground and source of pride ... ~ Pete Munro

Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry. ~ Alice Munro

To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. ~ Alice Munro

The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same. ~ Alice Munro

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming. ~ Alice Munro

And in the sting and misery of his defeat, he began to chant loudly and defiantly the hymn of his threatened idol:
Sredni Vashtar went forth,
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful. ~ Saki

All these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center. ~ Alice Munro

You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

What kind of hellish punishment does Lev have planned if he needs the females' crazy magic moon water? Nothing Talon has ever heard of but the gryphon is a recluse and stories about him keep children from sneaking out alone; a terribly convoluted mixture of the rogue army attack on his eyrie, death, and the name Lev, one of the few survivors mean enough to live through it. ~ Elizabeth Munro

And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence.
'If I loved you I would have written differently. ~ Alice Munro

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

The job she had to do, as she saw it, was to remember everything - and by "remember" she meant experience it in her mind, one more time - then store it away forever. This day's experience set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside. ~ Alice Munro

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

I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes. ~ Alice Munro

The Life of Sir Thomas Munro, by the Rev. G. R. Gleig, in two volumes, a new edition (London, 1831), vol. ii, p. 175. ~ William Sleeman

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place. ~ Jennifer Haigh

Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day's shooting. They never came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it." Here the child's voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human. "Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing 'Bertie, why do you bound?' as he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window - ~ Saki

Shakespeare should have prepared her. ~ Alice Munro

The Shubert grandparents. No comfort there. He in uniform, she in a ball gown, displaying absurd self-satisfaction. They had got what they wanted, Sophia supposed, and had only contempt for those not so conniving or so lucky. ~ Alice Munro

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

For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done. ~ Alice Munro

They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable. ~ Alice Munro

If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse. ~ Alice Munro

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

They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy ~ Alice Munro

These are not sentimental keepsakes. She never looks at them, and often forgets what she has there. They are not booty, they don't have ritualistic significance. She does not take something every time she goes to Gordon's house, or every time she stays over, or to mark what she might call memorable visits. She doesn't do it in a daze and she doesn't seem to be under a compulsion. She just takes something, every now and then, and puts it away in the dark of the old tobacco tin, and more or less forgets about it. ~ Alice Munro

The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame. ~ Alice Munro

Naturally my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by "feminist." In the beginning I used to say, well, of course I'm a feminist. But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not. I think I'm a feminist as far as thinking that the experience of women is important. That is really the basis of feminism. ~ Alice Munro

His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

Financial standing, a social position beyond what she has now, and a husband to dote upon her every wish. What more could she ask for?"
"Maybe youth. Vigor. Teeth."
"Lord Cameron has his own teeth." Margaret narrowed her eyes at the other candidate. "I'm not so certain about Munro. They seemed somewhat clacky at dinner, so I'm suspicious. ~ Karen Hawkins

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve. ~ Hector Hugh Munro