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d958091
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You remember your history?" He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, "Not altogether."
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Alice Munro |
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412aab7
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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
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Alice Munro |
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5c6ca51
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Una volta ragazze e ragazzi cercavano in ogni modo di apparire donne e uomini fatti, spesso con risultati ridicoli. Ora invece c'erano uomini e donne che cercavano di sembrare ragazzini finche, presumibilmente, un giorno si svegliavano a un passo dalla vecchiaia. (Marrakesh)
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Alice Munro |
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316f155
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Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn't just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.
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Alice Munro |
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bd6506b
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She sat with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face as if she'd been given a present she knew she would like, even if she hadn't got the wrapping off it yet.
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Alice Munro |
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5b177e1
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they lived in a curious but not unhappy isolation, though her father was a popular schoolteacher. Partly they were cut off by Sara's heart trouble, but also by their subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network, which nobody around them listened to. By Sara's making her own clothes--sometimes ineptly-- from Vogue patterns, instead of Butterick. Even by the way they preserved some impr..
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patterns
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Alice Munro |
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de24c67
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Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence, Everywhere an insult in your face. As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is l..
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contemporary-fiction
dear-life
munro
nobel-prize
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Alice Munro |
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d121b8f
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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. I don't believe so.
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Alice Munro |
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d40359b
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I looked at the rusty-bottomed bread tin swiped too often by the dishcloth, and the pots sitting on the stove, washed but not put away, and the motto supplied by Fairholme Dairy: The Lord is the Heart of Our House. All these things stupidly waiting for the day to begin and not knowing that it had been hollowed out by catastrophe.
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Alice Munro |
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54e06ef
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The Shubert grandparents. No comfort there. He in uniform, she in a ball gown, displaying absurd self-satisfaction. They had got what they wanted, Sophia supposed, and had only contempt for those not so conniving or so lucky.
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Alice Munro |
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29d2528
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Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid and have it taken from you.
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passion
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Alice Munro |
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136a9b6
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Certain suggestions, or notions, would make the muscles of her lean spotty face quiver, her eyes go sharp and black, and her mouth work as if there was a despicable taste in it. She could stop you in your tracks then, like a savage thornbush.
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Alice Munro |
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b579504
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I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion, a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily and bountifully that even if it is rejected he can move along as buoyantly as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that, inexperienced as I was. Just a person who took comfort in the momen..
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love
men
relationships
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Alice Munro |
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6b0c227
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Georgia took once a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think. Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a ..
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Alice Munro |
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44edc0e
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It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better.
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Alice Munro |
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48cf875
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The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on.
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Alice Munro |
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dd1f029
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La cuestion es ser feliz -dijo Neal-. A toda costa. Intentalo. Se puede. Y luego cada vez resulta mas facil. No tiene nada que ver con las circunstancias. No te imaginas hasta que punto funciona. Se aceptan las cosas y la tragedia desaparece. O pesa menos, en cualquier caso, y de pronto descubres que estas en paz con el mundo.
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Alice Munro |
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7177d0e
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Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful.
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Alice Munro |
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48d1d14
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The deceits which her spinster's sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children's hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.
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Alice Munro |
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d088985
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Here they found themselves year after year- a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children's dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance- not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern..
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Alice Munro |
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d0f68c6
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The relatives didn't feel slighted--they had a limited interest in people like Roy who had just married into the family, and not even contributed any children to it, and who were not like themselves. They were large, expansive, talkative. He was short, compact, quiet.
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Alice Munro |
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2ec2b76
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As I walked into Jubilee I repossessed the world. Trees, houses, fences, streets, cambe back to me, in their own sober and familiar shapes. 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..
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Alice Munro |
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2c80982
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No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.
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Alice Munro |
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b051b37
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grys khwdsh nmy dnst chqdr srd st, fkr my krd shtyqy kh nshn my dhd byd mnjr bh ldht hyy shwd kh, dr khlwt w khyl, b anh ashn bwd, w Hss my krd z an bh b`dsh r mwry byd bh `hdh bgyrd. kh nmy grft.
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experience
feeling
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Alice Munro |
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1e6ed56
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the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging.
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Alice Munro |
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0f3fe57
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How am I supposed to know? She just wants to do it. You wait. You'll see. She'll get you over there bawling and whining about what a bastard I am. One of these days.
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Alice Munro |
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3619bfb
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Juliet knew that, to many people, she might seem to be odd and solitary--and so, in a way, she was. But she had also had the experience, for much of her life, of feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul. And usually, she let them. Be available, be friendly (especially if you are not popular)--that was what you learned in a small town and also in a girls' dormitory. Be accommodating to any..
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Alice Munro |
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54952b2
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How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.
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short-stories
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Alice Munro |
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4724a94
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For some reason he thinks of Diane in her unbecoming red ski jacket and decides that her life is her life, there is not much use worrying about it. And he thinks of his wife, pretending to laugh at the television. Her quietness.
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Alice Munro |
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dcbb5ed
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She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but *presumptuous*. She had to try to see herself, then, as somebody who could be /made happy/. The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundle of her -- was that something that could just be picked up and /made happy/?
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self
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Alice Munro |
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48d6d01
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bry hmyn Hl drm rh w rwshm r `wD my knm w dstkm f`l khdHfZ dftr khTrt. hmyshh Hss my krdm mjry wq``jyb w Gryb dr zndgy m tfq my ftd, w khyly mhm st kh hmh chyz r thbt krdh bshm. y`ny yn fqT yk Hss bwd?
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memory
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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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1775be6
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So it wasn't Peggy I was interested in, not her tears, her crumpled looks. She reminded me too much of myself. It was her comforters I marvelled at. How they seemed to bow down and declare themselves in front of her. What had they been saying? Nothing in particular. All right, they said. It's all right, Peggy, they said. Now, Peggy. All right. All right. Such kindness. That anybody could be so kind. It is true that these young men, brought ..
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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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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 |