Munro Quotes & Sayings

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works. — Ann Beattie

A hero worn out by his struggle, one who had sacrificed his youth - that was how he might present himself, not without effect. And it was true, in a way. He was physically brave, he had ideals, he was born a peasant and knew what it was to be despised. And she too, just now, had been despising him. — Alice Munro

Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers. Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey's Scotch and Poodle's cocaine. — Nick Cave

This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with. — 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

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

He described to her the house he had built for himself, in outside appearance a shack, but delightful inside, at least to him. A sleeping loft with a little round window. Everything he needed right where he could put his hand to it, out in the open, nothing in cupboards. A short walk from the house he had a bathtub sunk in the earth, in the middle of a bed of sweet herbs. He would carry hot water to it by the pailful and lounge there under the stars, even in the winter. He grew vegetables, and shared them with the deer.
(From the story "Powers") — 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

I began to understand that there were certain talkers
certain girls
whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people
people like me
who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway. — Alice Munro

It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom. — Alice Munro

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

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel, — Alice Munro

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

Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity. — Alice Munro

There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive. — Alice Munro

Greta moved on. She kept smiling. Nobody looked at her with any recognition or pleasure and why should they? People's eyes slid round her and then they went on with their conversations. They laughed. Everybody but Greta was equipped with friends, jokes, half-secrets, everybody appeared to have found somebody to welcome them. — Alice Munro

How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn't get hold of it at all. I — 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

This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer, or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride - he's my dad - and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go. — Nick Cave

He could no more describe the feeling he got from her than you can describe a smell. It's like the scorch of electricity. It's like burnt kernels of wheat. No, it's like a bitter orange. I give up. — Alice Munro

I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds
this was a comfort to me. — Alice Munro

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

She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word 'escape' used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about. — Alice Munro

To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin. — 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

The red velvet material was hard to work with, it pulled, and the style my mother had chosen was not easy either. She was not really a good sewer. She liked to make things; that is different. Whenever she could she tried to skip basting and pressing and she took no pride in the fine points of tailoring, the finishing of buttonholes and the overcasting of seams as, for instance, my aunt and my grandmother did. — Alice Munro

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

And there was still a lot of soft snow in the bush. We — 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

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information. — Alice Munro

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

This torn typography

of healed glyphs

a stuttered ancient

alphabet in skin

spells warrior tales

of battles lost

and gained

and homecomings

hard won

their meaning

barely touched

with fingertips

and gentle lips

to give them honor due

survivors

home to hearth

and loving arms

far-eyed survivors

who hear yet

the clash of arms

from distant corners

of the sky. — Munro Sickafoose

Such a pity, really; the prey falling for the predator. The victim in love with the killer ... A mere mortal girl thinking a demon was capable of love. — Charlotte Munro

The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them. — Hector Hugh Munro

When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left — Alice Munro

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

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

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

His mother saw that he was not lonesome, and because she was an understanding mother, even though she was a cow, she let him just sit there and be happy. — Munro Leaf

I hate babies. They're so human. — Hector Hugh Munro

The only choice I make is to write about what interests me in a way that interests me, that gives me pleasure. It may not look like pleasure, because the difficulties can make me morose and distracted, but that's what it is - the pleasure of telling the story I mean to tell as wholly as I can tell it, of finding out in fact what that story is, by working around the different ways of telling it. — Alice Munro

In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it. — Alice Munro

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

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

Never in her life had this silly feeling of being enhanced by what she had put on herself. — Alice Munro

"Dr. Munro, sir," said he, "I am a walking museum. You could fit what ISN'T the matter with me on to the back of a
visiting card. If there's any complaint you want to make a special study of, just you come to me, sir, and see what I can do for you. It's not every one that can say that he has had cholera three times, and cured himself by living on red pepper and brandy." — Arthur Conan Doyle

There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever. — Alice Munro

My sister and I didn't know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn't what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty. "Purse. Purse stolen," said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel. — Alice Munro

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. — 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

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

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

She would have said that love was hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant postration — Alice Munro

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

What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee. — Alice Munro

Munro stood in the doorway, watching the two faeries peer into his fridge as thought it was the strangest thing they'd ever seen. — India Drummond

Marketing Makes Success'! — David 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

And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in? — Alice Munro

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly. — Alice Munro

You remember your history?" He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, "Not altogether. — 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

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people. — Alice Munro

There were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away. — 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

No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones. — Alice Munro

I had been in love all year, or at least since the first week in September, when a boy named Martin Collingwood had given me a surprised, appreciative, and rather ominously complacent smile in the school assembly. I never knew what surprised him; I was not looking like anybody but me; I had an old blouse on and my home-permanent had turned out badly. — Alice Munro

For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief. — Alice Munro

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple. — Alice Munro

If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true. — Alice Munro

By the sound of things, you know nothing about mathematics.'
'You can put it like that. I'm utterly useless.'
'Useless is such a harsh word, you are merely ... inexperienced. So I thought we could start at the beginning.'
'I'm not that stupid. I know how to add, subtract and multiply-'
'I don't mean that kind of beginning ... — Charlotte Munro

Here they found themselves year after year- a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children's dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance- not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles's living room. — Alice Munro

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing. — Alice Munro

People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life. — Alice Munro

Munro snorted. "So he's supposed to go down to the loch at half-crack o' the morning, paddle about in the frigid water for an hour or two, and then emerge? I'm finding it difficult to believe she'd see anything impressive."
Everyone laughed. — Tessa Dare

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

I slipped the envelope into it, there in the wide lower corridor of the Arts Building with people passing me on the way to classes, on the way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room. On their way to deeds they didn't know they had in them. — 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

...the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging. — Alice Munro

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful. — Cynthia Ozick

He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying. — Alice Munro

It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long, brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were. — Alice Munro

She smiled at me with such merriment of recognition, and such a yearning to be recognised in return, that you would think this was a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand. — Alice Munro

Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well. — Hector Hugh Munro

By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine. — Hector Hugh Munro

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

I will bear Cloud through the portal," Fury says as Soar ties the last knot on his armour. "Flay will carry you."
"Who?" Soar turns as the female nods.
She's carrying me?
"Where are we going?"
"Skyfall, Master Soar," Fury stands. Cloud is small in his arms. "You shall be a guest of the Dragonkin."
"I hope our guest is delicious," Flay comments as she looks Soar over. Is she flirting or does she plan on eating him?
Maybe both. — Elizabeth Munro

Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss. — Alice 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

For later generations of women - post Sexual Revolution - enjoying sex was to become simply a duty, the perfect orgasm yet another thing to add to the list of required accomplishments; and when enjoyment becomes a duty, we're back in the land of dreariness of spirit. — 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

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

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

I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience. — Hector Hugh 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

A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought. — Hector Hugh Munro

Alas he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man. — 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 now belonged to two Doms. She was theirs for the taking, but also for the giving — Lila 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