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639df5f
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My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.
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Alice Munro |
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76b0a1f
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That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting.
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Alice Munro |
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31db4fd
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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, and you're just there, going along easy in the world.
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Alice Munro |
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27ed843
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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..
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Alice Munro |
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229d629
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There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It's true. Was true. You will want to have..
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Alice Munro |
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ad1c25f
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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."
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Alice Munro |
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0539509
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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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Alice Munro |
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f0131f3
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Children use that word "hate" to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened...It is not physical harm that is feared...so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets."
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fears
hate
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Alice Munro |
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79e7365
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It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee.
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sex
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Alice Munro |
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55fc93e
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I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough.
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Alice Munro |
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3d2bef0
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I had once heard somebody say, at a party, that one of the nice things about marriage was that you could have real affairs - an affair before marriage could always turn out to be nothing but courtship.
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Alice Munro |
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43cf17f
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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9695d47
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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 might not think so. They do not care.
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Alice Munro |
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3c3468f
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In all my years in the town, I encountered no one who was divorced, and so it may be taken for granted that there were other couples living separate lives in one house, other men and women who had accepted the fact that 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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8c41b1d
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Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person's mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness.
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Alice Munro |
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6e7b97a
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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5329d03
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If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.
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Alice Munro |
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afe2009
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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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Alice Munro |
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8d2d004
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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a183e6a
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Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity.
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Alice Munro |
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56458aa
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Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.
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Alice Munro |
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bc13ebd
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Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories-- the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.
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fantasy
inner-world
music
singing
story
story-telling
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Alice Munro |
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0837c7a
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hmyshh ykh rwz SbH hst khh wqty bydr myshwy, myfhmy ngr hmhy prndhhy shhrt khwch khrdhnd.
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Alice Munro |
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cf55ad0
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Love is not for the undepilated.
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love
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Alice Munro |
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b8ffc98
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grys nmy twnst twDyH bdhd y drst bfhmd kh anchh Hss my krd dw hm rfth Hsdt nbwd, khshm bwd0 dlylsh hm yn nbwd kh nmy twnst an Twry khryd knd y lbs bpwshd0 yn bwd kh z dkhtrh twq` dshtnd yn jwry bshnd0 mrdh, mrdm, hmh adm h, fkr my krdnd dkhtr byd yn jwry bshd0 khwshgl, `zyzdrdnh, nnr, khwdkhwh, b mGzy bh ndzh nkhwd0 dkhtr byd yn jwry bshd t bshwd `shqsh shd. b`d mdr my shd w khwdsh r b swz w gdz wqf bchh hysh my krd0 dygr khwdkhwh nbwd, fqT..
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girls
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Alice Munro |
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474618c
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He said the difference between the male and female modes of thought were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and girl, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, "I must wash my hair." When I read this I was frantically upset; I had to put the magazine down. It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as a girl thought; the full moon would nev..
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Alice Munro |
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6b9b9fa
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Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be.
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Alice Munro |
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d306160
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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"
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Alice Munro |
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e69f51d
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this is not a story, only life.
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Alice Munro |
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56314e6
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Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow. "It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the ..
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conservatism
parochialism
poverty
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Alice Munro |
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335a3cd
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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afe1459
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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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e43454b
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MY MOTHER PRAYED on her knees at midday, at night, and first thing in the morning. Every day opened up to her to have God's will done in it. Every night she totted up what she'd done and said and thought, to see how it squared with Him. That kind of life is dreary, people think, but they're missing the point. For one thing, such a life can never be boring. And nothing can happen to you that you can't make use of. Even if you're wracked by t..
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Alice Munro |
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76cdfc1
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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dd30bf6
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I was young, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm.
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Alice Munro |
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3cb2ee8
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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b4ce83a
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The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame.
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Alice Munro |
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30c73af
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She hoped he wouldn't ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would be taken as drearily typical.
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Alice Munro |
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0f4e8c8
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He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying.
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Alice Munro |
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4ec13ab
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They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy
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Alice Munro |
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b0d210c
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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 ..
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Alice Munro |
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255ba7e
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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674400c
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She would lean her head against the back pillow of the sofa, thinking that she lay in his arms. You would not think that she'd remember his face but it would spring up in detail, the face of a creased and rather tired-looking, satirical, indoor sort of man. Nor was his body lacking, it was presented as reasonably worn but competent, and uniquely desirable.
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Alice Munro |
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6038fae
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hector him like this from now on, when I could get him alone.
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Alice Munro |