Alice Munro Quotes

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.

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.

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...

Y Doree se preguntó por qué tenía que importarle lo que Maggie pensara. Maggie era una extraña, ni siquiera se sentía a gusto con ella. Fue Lloyd quien lo dijo, y tenía razón.

I don’t take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me
somewhere... I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more like a house.

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

It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee.

Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence, like dancing and nice dinners-something that shouldn't interfere with people's being kind and cheerful to each other.

Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories- the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her singing was a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars.

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

Cuando estás fatal es cuando intentan pillarte.

Children use that word "hate" to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened...It is not physical harm that is feared...so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets.

Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

A los hombres les encantan las rarezas cuando la chica es lo suficientemente bonita

I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.