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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e7aaf1d | For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you're read.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| af352e6 | 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 | Alice Munro | ||
| 218829b | The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life. | Alice Munro | ||
| e44372a | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| efd5f0c | 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 .. | faking-it women | Alice Munro | |
| 7a7f420 | Shakespeare should have prepared her. | Alice Munro | ||
| f81c138 | 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." | Alice Munro | ||
| 0184598 | To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin. | Alice Munro | ||
| 3671f8e | 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.. | Alice Munro | ||
| d958091 | 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." | Alice Munro | ||
| 412aab7 | 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 | Alice Munro | ||
| 5c6ca51 | 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) | Alice Munro | ||
| 316f155 | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| bd6506b | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| 5b177e1 | 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.. | patterns | Alice Munro | |
| de24c67 | 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.. | contemporary-fiction dear-life munro nobel-prize | Alice Munro | |
| d121b8f | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| d40359b | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| 54e06ef | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| 29d2528 | 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. | passion | Alice Munro | |
| 136a9b6 | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| b579504 | 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.. | love men relationships | Alice Munro | |
| 6b0c227 | 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 .. | Alice Munro | ||
| 44edc0e | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| 48cf875 | The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on. | Alice Munro | ||
| dd1f029 | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| 7177d0e | Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful. | Alice Munro | ||
| 48d1d14 | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| d088985 | 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.. | Alice Munro | ||
| d0f68c6 | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| 2ec2b76 | 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.. | Alice Munro | ||
| 2c80982 | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| b051b37 | 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. | experience feeling | Alice Munro | |
| 1e6ed56 | the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging. | Alice Munro | ||
| 0f3fe57 | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| 3619bfb | 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.. | Alice Munro | ||
| 54952b2 | 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. | short-stories | Alice Munro | |
| 4724a94 | 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. | Alice Munro | ||
| dcbb5ed | 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/? | self | Alice Munro | |
| 48d6d01 | 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? | memory | Alice Munro | |
| 1940552 | He told her that he had got into acting by way of his religion. His family belonged to some Christian sect Greta had never heard of. This sect was not numerous but very rich, or at least some of them were. They had built a church with a theater in it in a town on the prairie. That was where he started to act before he was ten years old. They did parables from the Bible but also present day, about the awful things that happened to people who.. | Alice Munro | ||
| 484ab52 | But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place? | Alice Munro | ||
| 91b4acf | L'attimo di felicita che aveva diviso con loro gli resto nei ricordi, ma non seppe mai che farsene. Chissa se quei momenti significano davvero, come sembra, che avremmo a disposizione una vita felice nella quale ci imbattiamo, consapevolmente, solo qualche rara volta? Chissa se gettano su quel che precede e quel che segue, tutto cio che e accaduto nella nostra vita, o che noi abbiamo fatto accadere, una luce tale da rendere ogni cosa trascu.. | Alice Munro | ||
| 3196779 | I actually had a long career as a flirt ahead of me. It's quite a natural behaviour, once the loss of love makes you give up your ideas of marriage. | Alice Munro |