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a3af464
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The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
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Alice Munro |
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759c77f
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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fec64bd
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A story is not like a road to follow ... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or spars..
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discovery
writing
exploration
creative-process
stories
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Alice Munro |
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cdcbed8
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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707cc35
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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06da198
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You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
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shame
secrets
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Alice Munro |
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0571b1b
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This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now..
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Alice Munro |
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3c3f507
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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132cad4
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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d22b0f9
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He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
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Alice Munro |
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060a55a
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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.
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love
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Alice Munro |
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5010d35
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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c0c7e2d
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Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
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Alice Munro |
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b33dd8a
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People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
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Alice Munro |
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0829c6f
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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2d69d8b
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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51c109b
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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9784e9c
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She would live now, not read.
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Alice Munro |
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ef6abec
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Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
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Alice Munro |
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2010d03
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We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do--we do it all the time.
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Alice Munro |
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0003a43
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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27733e0
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My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
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Alice Munro |
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8301a23
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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..
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Alice Munro |
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d0951b1
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You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
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Alice Munro |
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695b288
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Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
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Alice Munro |
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7ba4331
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What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it"."
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Alice Munro |
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5634e4b
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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..
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Alice Munro |
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124f82d
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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.
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unhappiness
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Alice Munro |
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5043d9f
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Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
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Alice Munro |
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d86f792
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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9a53a7e
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A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles. Can't you tolerate people being different, why is this so important? If this isn't important, nothing is. The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went t..
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fight
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Alice Munro |
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db616b2
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It's just life. You can't beat life.
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Alice Munro |
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1426f87
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And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
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Alice Munro |
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11def52
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Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
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beauty
brain
elegance
class
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Alice Munro |
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736c3b6
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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194fa9f
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There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
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Alice Munro |
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3bc540f
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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.
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pride
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Alice Munro |
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c793209
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The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.
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Alice Munro |
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38580eb
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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869cd1c
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I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
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Alice Munro |
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665b568
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Things have changed, of course. There are counsellors at the ready. Kindness and understanding. Life is harder for some, we're told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imaginary. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non recipient, as the case may be. But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.
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Alice Munro |
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d4798c3
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I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.
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Alice Munro |
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e03afc3
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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7a51ee8
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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.
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Alice Munro |