Top 180 Alice Munro Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.”

— Alice Munro

52. “I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.”

— Alice Munro

53. “There ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for – but never did get to see.”

— Alice Munro

54. “That was her way. She carried not noticing to an extreme. Not noticing, not intruding, not suggesting.”

— Alice Munro

55. “You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.”

— Alice Munro

56. “He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.”

— Alice Munro

57. “To be made of flesh was humiliation.”

— Alice Munro

58. “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

— Alice Munro

59. “Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.”

— Alice Munro

60. “His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.”

— Alice Munro

61. “I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.”

— Alice Munro

62. “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 children, though.”

— Alice Munro

63. “Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person.”

— Alice Munro

64. “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.”

— Alice Munro

65. “To be a femme fatale you don’t have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.”

— Alice Munro

66. “When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified – no, frightened – by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity – that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends.”

— Alice Munro

67. “The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.”

— Alice Munro

68. “What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.”

— Alice Munro

69. “It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.”

— Alice Munro

70. “And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.”

— Alice Munro

71. “My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.”

— Alice Munro

72. “Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.”

— Alice Munro

73. “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.”

— Alice Munro

74. “And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?”

— Alice Munro

75. “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.”

— Alice Munro

76. “They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy.”

— Alice Munro

77. “Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.”

— Alice Munro

78. “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.”

— Alice Munro

79. “Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.”

— Alice Munro

80. “The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.”

— Alice Munro

81. “Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity.”

— Alice Munro

82. “Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?”

— Alice Munro

83. “One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.”

— Alice Munro

84. “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.”

— Alice Munro

85. “I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing with the material I’m inundated with that poses the problem.”

— Alice Munro

86. “The stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, with a paler purple flower, and stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce, skin-piercing and inflaming spines. Those would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow.”

— Alice Munro

87. “She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.”

— Alice Munro

88. “It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long, brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were.”

— Alice Munro

89. “It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.”

— Alice Munro

90. “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

91. “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.”

— Alice Munro

92. “My mother had a habit of hanging onto – even treasuring – the foibles of my distant infantile state.”

— Alice Munro

93. “And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble – the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.”

— Alice Munro

94. “A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.”

— Alice Munro

95. “I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds – this was a comfort to me.”

— Alice Munro

96. “Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.”

— Alice Munro

97. “Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.”

— Alice Munro

98. “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.”

— Alice Munro

99. “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.”

— Alice Munro

100. “In twenty years I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to think about someone else’s needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.”

— Alice Munro