Top 180 Alice Munro Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.”

— Alice Munro

103. “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

104. “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.”

— Alice Munro

105. “I know how you love this place,” he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don’t tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself I loved here – some self that I have finished with, and none too soon.”

— Alice Munro

106. “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.”

— Alice Munro

107. “I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.”

— Alice Munro

108. “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

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

— Alice Munro

110. “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.”

— Alice Munro

111. “But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?”

— Alice Munro

112. “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

113. “And so it often happened with those practical people. In spite of their calculations, their survival instincts, they might not get as far as they had quite reasonable expected.”

— Alice Munro

114. “I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.”

— Alice Munro

115. “The final four works are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.”

— Alice Munro

116. “I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn’t believe it anymore.”

— Alice Munro

117. “I had been in love all year, or at least since the first week in September, when a boy named Martin Collingwood had given me a surprised, appreciative, and rather ominously complacent smile in the school assembly. I never knew what surprised him; I was not looking like anybody but me; I had an old blouse on and my home-permanent had turned out badly.”

— Alice Munro

118. “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

119. “We had a hard life but we didn’t know it... We had power... it’s a power of transformation you have, when you’re stuffed full of fear and eagerness – not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it.”

— Alice Munro

120. “Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry.”

— Alice Munro

121. “She barely notices when I say that I am going on to Toronto to visit my grandparents. Except to remark that they must be really old. Not a word about Alister. Not even a bad word. She would not have forgotten. Just tidied up the scene and put it away in a closet with her former selves. Or maybe she really is a person who can deal recklessly with humiliation.”

— Alice Munro

122. “There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.”

— Alice Munro

123. “This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you’ve been driving for a long time – you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.”

— Alice Munro

124. “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

125. “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

126. “Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after – like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.”

— Alice Munro

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

— Alice Munro

128. “Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.”

— Alice Munro

129. “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.”

— Alice Munro

130. “This is the day of wonders. The land is covered with trees like a head with hair and behind the ship the sun rises tipping the top trees with light. The sky is clear and shining as a china plate and the water playfully ruffled with wind. Every wisp of fog is gone and the air is full of the resinous smell of the trees. Seabirds are flashing above the sails golden like creatures from Heaven, but the sailors raise a few shots to keep them from the rigging.”

— Alice Munro

131. “The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame.”

— Alice Munro

132. “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.”

— Alice Munro

133. “People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.”

— Alice Munro

134. “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.”

— Alice Munro

135. “I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life – things will probably happen in your life – that will make this seem minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about.”

— Alice Munro

136. “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.”

— Alice Munro

137. “She thought that when she went with Peter to an engineers’ party, the atmosphere was pleasant though the talk was boring. That was because everybody had their importance fixed and settled at least for the time being. Here nobody was safe. Judgment might be passed behind backs, even on the known and published. An air of cleverness or nerves obtained, no matter who you were.”

— Alice Munro

138. “Maybe it’s an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can’t help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn’t such a muddle.”

— Alice Munro

139. “Life is always so full. Getting and spending we lay waste to our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do?”

— Alice Munro

140. “There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.”

— Alice Munro

141. “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 life. As if we needed, more of life.”

— Alice Munro

142. “To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.”

— Alice Munro

143. “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

144. “Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.”

— Alice Munro

145. “I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn’t go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.”

— Alice Munro

146. “She would have said that love was hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant postration.”

— Alice Munro

147. “Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be.”

— Alice Munro

148. “There’s a kind of tension that if I’m getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don’t feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that’s explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.”

— Alice Munro

149. “The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.”

— Alice Munro

150. “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