Quotes from Alice Munro

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.

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.

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

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

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.

If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

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.

People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

She would live now, not read.

For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

I feel that I've done what I wanted to do, and that makes me feel fairly content.

It's just life. You can't beat life.

The constant happiness is curiosity.

They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.

People have thoughts they'd sooner not have. It happens in life.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Writers are always writing about infidelity. It's so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you're also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it's just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion.