Top 180 Alice Munro Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Her father was outraged. “Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?”

— Alice Munro

103. “Shakespeare should have prepared her.”

— Alice Munro

104. “Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft – a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.”

— Alice Munro

105. “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

106. “I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.”

— Alice Munro

107. “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

108. “Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful.”

— Alice Munro

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Alice Munro

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Alice Munro

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Alice Munro

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Alice Munro

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Alice Munro

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “In all my years in the town, I encountered no one who was divorced, and so it may be taken for granted that there were other couples living separate lives in one house, other men and women who had accepted the fact that there were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.”

— Alice Munro

143. “The preference most of them had for seeing through their camera, rather than looking at the real thing, and so on.”

— Alice Munro

144. “He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying.”

— Alice Munro

145. “Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both.”

— Alice Munro

146. “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

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

— Alice Munro

148. “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

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

— Alice Munro

150. “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