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eb0444c
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What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old. It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on some..
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marriage
wife
mother
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Alice Munro |
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2260dfa
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Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
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chaddeleys-and-flemings
connection
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Alice Munro |
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f7974f8
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I lie in bed beside my little sister, listening to the singing in the yard. Life is transformed, by these voices, by these presences, by their high spirits and grand esteem, for themselves and each other. My parents, all of us, are on holiday. The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and then to my surprise--for I am surprised, even though I know the p..
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Alice Munro |
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820280f
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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."
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Alice Munro |
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181b57a
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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934e1ae
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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 w..
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Alice Munro |
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42edf95
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And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence. 'If I loved you I would have written differently.
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Alice Munro |
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4f0e570
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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a765458
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Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places
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Alice Munro |
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a721df2
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One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them.
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Alice Munro |
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4474448
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people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one
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Alice Munro |
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3f16a07
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Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence, like dancing and nice dinners--something that shouldn't interfere with people's being kind and cheerful to each other.
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Alice Munro |
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393f516
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Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead.
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Alice Munro |
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7171256
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I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
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Alice Munro |
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4891125
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One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
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Alice Munro |
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00df91f
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I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.
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Alice Munro |
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8c71247
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It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.
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Alice Munro |
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c17b3cb
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I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn't go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.
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usefulness
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Alice Munro |
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dc7398c
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Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I've never been there, isn't that a good enough reason?
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Alice Munro |
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5b6b63f
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Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
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Alice Munro |
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883c5e0
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For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?
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man
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Alice Munro |
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35ec011
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Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation...subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to...
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Alice Munro |
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e7fcbaf
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Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.
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precociousness
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Alice Munro |
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4f16499
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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48d3f06
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None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade.
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Alice Munro |
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3946f0e
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People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? T..
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shops
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Alice Munro |
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6589729
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A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks
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Alice Munro |
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b714dc4
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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
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Alice Munro |
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7d46036
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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d51ab27
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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.
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love
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Alice Munro |
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cd44858
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At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure--even at a time of the month when this could not be true--that I had blood on my s..
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Alice Munro |
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f89ce91
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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d907026
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Long after all the chocolates were eaten, and the cousins had gone, we kept the chocolate-box in the linen-drawer in the dining-room sideboard, waiting for some ceremonial use that never presented itself. It was still full of the empty chocolate cups of dark, fluted paper. In the wintertime I would sometimes go into the cold dining room and sniff at the cups, inhaling their smell of artifice and luxury; I would read again the descriptions o..
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Alice Munro |
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8feb303
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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." --
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Alice Munro |
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3084581
|
He seemed happy. She thought that she seldom concerned herself about Laurence's being happy. She wanted him to be in a good mood, so that everything would go smoothly, but that was not the same thing.
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Alice Munro |
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79bba17
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The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
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Alice Munro |
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8cd0d90
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People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life.
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Alice Munro |
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2d0a267
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You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.
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Alice Munro |
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11a5af3
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It seems so ridiculous to me,' he said, 'that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean like the suit of clothes of an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can't ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and th..
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Alice Munro |
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d559e6a
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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a2e8420
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A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.
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Alice Munro |
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cf2377a
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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 ..
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Alice Munro |
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c770c08
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What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee.
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Alice Munro |
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2fe3fdb
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My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.
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Alice Munro |