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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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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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f7be45f
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for since Munro's chosen form is the short story, her overriding theme is brevity--look now, act now, contemplate now, because soon, very soon, this thing that involves you will be over.
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Alice Munro |
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f4676d4
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Captain Tervitt had been a real captain, for many years, on the lake boats. Now he had a job as a special constable. He stopped the cars to let the children cross the street in front of the school and kept them from sledding down the side street in winter. He blew his whistle and held up one big hand, which looked like a clown's hand, in a white glove. He was still tall and straight and broad-shouldered, though old and white-haired. Cars wo..
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clown
lake
proud-professional
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Alice Munro |
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00ba14f
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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
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Alice Munro |
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83f1b28
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Her father was outraged. "Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?"
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Alice Munro |
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0527a7f
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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.
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Alice Munro |
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af352e6
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Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do? Remember
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Alice Munro |
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218829b
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The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.
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Alice Munro |
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e44372a
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They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was the thing most adults seemed to have.
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Alice Munro |
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efd5f0c
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Not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well, good, now that's over, over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over? Freedom--or not even freedom. Emptiness, a lapse of attention. It seemed all the time that she was having to provide a little more--in the way of attention, enthusiasm, watchfulness--than she was sure she had. She was straining, hoping not to ..
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faking-it
women
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Alice Munro |
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7a7f420
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Shakespeare should have prepared her.
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Alice Munro |
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f81c138
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Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind," her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. "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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0184598
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To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.
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Alice Munro |
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3671f8e
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Chess worked for a wholesale grocery firm. He had thought of being a history teacher, but his father had persuaded him that teaching was no way to support a wife and get on in the world. His father had helped him get this job but told him that once he got in he was not to expect any favors. He didn't. He left the house before it was light, during this first winter of our marriage, and came home after dark. He worked hard, not asking that th..
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Alice Munro |