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3e76c3e
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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. It could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone.
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Alice Munro |
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3f5b030
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He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want? It was too polite, I said.
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humor
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Alice Munro |
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1694482
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Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle--
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Alice Munro |
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3d024cf
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there were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.
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Alice Munro |
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a65ac4b
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Hugo felt the world was hostile to his writing, he felt not only all its human inhabitants but its noises and diversions and ordinary clutter were linked against him, maliciously, purposefully, diabolically thwarting and maiming him and keeping him from his work. And I, whose business it was to throw myself between him and the world, was failing to do so, by choice perhaps as much as ineptitude for the job. I did not believe in him. I had n..
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Alice Munro |
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3046e49
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They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable.
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Alice Munro |
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5648d09
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He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.
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Alice Munro |
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0229d1a
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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362aebd
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It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.
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Alice Munro |
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a4f38c1
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But I hope you will -- use your brains. Use your brains. Don't be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being -- distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.
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Alice Munro |
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edfa8f6
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He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into the low places. Like that--and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, "Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this han..
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Alice Munro |
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dcbdc78
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The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.
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Alice Munro |
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0e281cc
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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,
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Alice Munro |
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4ed9503
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Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.
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Alice Munro |
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99ed090
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And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.
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misunderstanding
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Alice Munro |
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fe2c5c2
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A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.
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Alice Munro |
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fbec172
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Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?
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Alice Munro |
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7a963c9
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yky dwbr krl ykdf`h shrw` krdh bwd bh Hrf zdn w kr khyly Hmqnh y krdh bwd, fqT bry ankh fD r `wD knd. z an krhyy kh kh wqty swrkrhy dst w pchlfty w wHshtzdh tzh kr Hss Hqrt my krdnd, z w sr my zd.
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Alice Munro |
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a690cca
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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..
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Alice Munro |
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b2c8f45
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Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.
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Alice Munro |
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8e926c7
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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 busin..
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Alice Munro |
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81f6f37
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It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love... the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.
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Alice Munro |
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5870384
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she started off with an inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran downhill. In the first place she could never find a pattern to suit her. It was no wonder; there were no patterns made to match the ideas that blossomed in her head.
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Alice Munro |
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930346b
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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. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to[...] It was being a watcher that did..
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Alice Munro |
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7332e07
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They would be displeased to have anybody call them docile, yet in a way they are. They submit themselves to manly behaviour. They submit themselves to manly behaviour with all its risks and cruelties, its complicated burdens and deliberate frauds. Its rules, which in some cases you benefited from, as a woman, and then some that you didn't.
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Alice Munro |
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ea81aa9
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It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation
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life-and-living
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Alice Munro |
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d5d6059
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Se suponia que saltar del tren era una cancelacion. Levantar el cuerpo, preparar las rodillas para entrar en un bloque de aire distinto. Se va en busca de vacio, y en cambio ?que encuentra? La inmediatez de una avalancha de paisajes nuevos que exigen una atencion que no pedian cuando ibas en el tren mirando por la ventanilla, sin mas. ?Que haces aqui? ?Adonde vas? Una sensacion de que te observan cosas de las que no sabias nada. De ser un i..
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Alice Munro |
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6aa7d8a
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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ecfc72a
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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b6b59f8
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He says the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?
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Alice Munro |
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c372814
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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 awa..
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Alice Munro |
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655a7f6
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I have been incredibly lucky," he said. "Lucky in my life. Oh, I know some people would not say so. They'd say I hadn't stuck with anything, or that I hadn't made any money. They'd say I wasted that time when I was down-and-out. But that's not true. "I heard the call," he said, raising his eyebrows, half smiling at himself. "Seriously. I did. I heard the call to get out of the box. Out of the got-to-do-something-big box. Out of the ego box...
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Alice Munro |
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6b7325f
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Detestaba la palabra <> aplicada a la ficcion. Podria haber argumentado, y no solo por llevar la contraria, que la evasion era la vida real.
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Alice Munro |
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6880ba3
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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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short-stories
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Alice Munro |
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b323646
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When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left
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Alice Munro |
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aa5e66d
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And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.
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Alice Munro |
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3d892a5
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Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs ..
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childhood
jog-your-memory
memories
nostalgia
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Alice Munro |
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6b9141d
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He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.
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Alice Munro |
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b92519d
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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969685e
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ngr ykh jyy twy ryh hy khrl swzn mrgbry bwd, w gr b HtyT nfs my khshyd, shyd an r Hs nmy khrd. wly hr z gh byd nfs `myq my khshyd, w swzn hnwz hmn j bwd.
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Alice Munro |
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aff8418
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She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking to new people, living among hordes of people every day who were not Clark. A life, a place, chosen for that specific reason--that it would not contain Clark. The strange and terrible thing coming clear to her about that world of the future, as she now pictured it, was that she would not exist there. She would only walk around, and open her mo..
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inertia
regret
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Alice Munro |
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de10419
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Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both
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Alice Munro |
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749cd64
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There ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for--but never did get to see.
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Alice Munro |
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78990c7
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The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather--a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart.
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Alice Munro |