Top 180 Alice Munro Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

— Alice Munro

2. “Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.”

— Alice Munro

3. “The constant happiness is curiosity.”

— Alice Munro

4. “They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.”

— Alice Munro

5. “Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.”

— Alice Munro

6. “In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.”

— Alice Munro

7. “The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.”

— Alice Munro

8. “It’s just life. You can’t beat life.”

— Alice Munro

9. “Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.”

— Alice Munro

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

10. “He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.”

— Alice Munro

11. “Life would be grand if it weren’t for the people.”

— Alice Munro

12. “Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.”

— Alice Munro

13. “Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”

— Alice Munro

14. “Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it’s going well as when it’s going badly.”

— Alice Munro

15. “I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”

— Alice Munro

16. “So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.”

— Alice Munro

17. “She would live now, not read.”

— Alice Munro

18. “In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.”

— Alice Munro

19. “Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.”

— Alice Munro

20. “Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.”

— Alice Munro

21. “Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.”

— Alice Munro

22. “You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.”

— Alice Munro

23. “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.”

— Alice Munro

24. “There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.”

— Alice Munro

25. “For we did makeup. But we didn’t forgive each other. And we didn’t take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief.”

— Alice Munro

26. “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

27. “It’s as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.”

— Alice Munro

28. “Now i no longer believe that people’s secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.”

— Alice Munro

29. “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.”

— Alice Munro

30. “I knew I would be famous one day. That’s because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.”

— Alice Munro

31. “And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.”

— Alice Munro

32. “I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.”

— Alice Munro

33. “The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.”

— Alice Munro

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

34. “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.”

— Alice Munro

35. “I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.”

— Alice Munro

36. “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.”

— Alice Munro

37. “WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.”

— Alice Munro

38. “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.”

— Alice Munro

39. “Love is not for the undepilated.”

— Alice Munro

40. “I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.”

— Alice Munro

Featured in: Romance Quotes

41. “The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail.”

— Alice Munro

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

42. “I don’t always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.”

— Alice Munro

Featured in: Reading Quotes, Quotes About Stories

43. “Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?”

— Alice Munro

44. “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.”

— Alice Munro

45. “That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.”

— Alice Munro

46. “Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.”

— Alice Munro

47. “The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”

— Alice Munro

48. “You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”

— Alice Munro

49. “The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.”

— Alice Munro

50. “Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.”

— Alice Munro

Featured in: Country Quotes