Top 180 Alice Munro Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Alice Munro

153. “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

154. “If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.”

— Alice Munro

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

— Alice Munro

156. “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

157. “Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts.”

— Alice Munro

158. “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

159. “Captain Tervitt had been a real captain, for many years, on the lake boats. Now he had a job as a special constable. He stopped the cars to let the children cross the street in front of the school and kept them from sledding down the side street in winter. He blew his whistle and held up one big hand, which looked like a clown’s hand, in a white glove. He was still tall and straight and broad-shouldered, though old and white-haired. Cars would do what he said, and the children, too.”

— Alice Munro

160. “But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It’s not a matter of one tree after another, it’s all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back.”

— Alice Munro

161. “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

162. “Alas he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man.”

— Alice Munro

163. “He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.”

— Alice Munro

164. “I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.”

— Alice Munro

165. “When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left.”

— Alice Munro

166. “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

167. “She smiled at me with such merriment of recognition, and such a yearning to be recognised in return, that you would think this was a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.”

— Alice Munro

168. “You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said – that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question.”

— Alice Munro

169. “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

170. “This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with.”

— Alice Munro

171. “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

172. “It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.”

— Alice Munro

173. “A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks.”

— Alice Munro

174. “These relatives of hers, the Boles and the Jetters and the Pooles, used to be around the house a lot, or else Lea wanted to be at one of their houses. It was a clan that didn’t always enjoy one another’s company but who made sure they got plenty of it.”

— Alice Munro

175. “She didn’t really plan to travel there. She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.”

— Alice Munro

176. “Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?”

— Alice Munro

177. “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 might not think so. They do not care.”

— Alice Munro

178. “She hoped he wouldn’t ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would be taken as drearily typical.”

— Alice Munro

179. “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

180. “I have a feeling that is so hard to describe. It’s like a boiled egg in my chest, with the shell left on.”

— Alice Munro

181. “I am a woman of violent contradiction.”

— Alice Munro

182. “The last days of May are among the longest of the year.”

— Alice Munro

183. “There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc – that was the lost hope of girls.”

— Alice Munro

184. “Learning to survive, no matter with what cravenness and caution, what shocks and forebodings, is not the same as being miserable. It is too interesting.”

— Alice Munro

185. “It occurred to him, and had occurred to him before, that there was after all something to be said for dealing with things the way most people of his age seemed to do. It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangement had altered.”

— Alice Munro

186. “You know one reason I know he’s not dead?′ said Sonje. ‘I don’t dream about him.”

— Alice Munro

187. “I went around the house to the back door thinking, I have been to a dance and a boy has walked me home and kissed me. It was all true. My life was possible.”

— Alice Munro

188. “I just think it would be beautiful,′ she says. ‘I think it would be beautiful if a woman could.”

— Alice Munro

189. “The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities – see the humanity – in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware.”

— Alice Munro

190. “On the way home he had explained that she wasn’t his type. And she had felt too humiliated to retort – or even to be aware, at that moment – that he was not hers.”

— Alice Munro