Alice Munro Daily
@MunroQuotes
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Daily prose excerpts and quotes by the late Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer
Wingham, Clinton, Comox Valley
Joined November 2019
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We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.
- “Dear Life”
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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.
- “Accident”
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Happiest of birthdays to Alice Munro! 🎉 🥂
I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by themselves.
- “Some Women”
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🥂 Happy birthday, Alice Munro! 🎉
I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by themselves.
- “Some Women”
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We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.
- “Dear Life”
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Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
- “The Progress of Love”
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Summer clouds, not rain clouds, were scudding across the sky. The whole countryside was changing, shaking itself loose, into the true brightness of a July day.
- “Runaway”
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Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply.
- “Child’s Play”
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6
56
On beginning to write Lives of Girls and Women - from The Paris Review interview (1994)
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The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.
- “Walker Brothers Cowboy”
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Every week she brought her mother three new books from the library. Her mother liked the sight of a good thick book. A lot of reading in that one, she would say, just as she would say there was a lot of wear in a coat or blanket.
- “Accident”
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9
51
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.
- “Accident”
0
14
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“If you’re a writer, you’re sort of spending your life trying to figure things out, and you put your figurings on paper, and other people read them. It’s a very odd thing, really.”
- Interview (2013)
2
9
48
She sat in the kitchen for hours. It was an effort for her to move, even to make a cup of tea or go to the bathroom. Moving her body shook up the information that she was trying to arrange in her head and get used to.
- “The Love of a Good Woman”
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4
46
It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom.
- Lives of Girls and Women
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For almost two years she had not taken any notice of the things that generally made people happy, such as nice weather or flowers in bloom or the smell of a bakery.
- “Dimensions”
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"I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don't ever think about what kind of fiction I write, or what I am writing about, or what I am trying to write about."
- interview, Writers & Co. (2004)
1
9
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I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by themselves.
- “Some Women”
1
3
39
“His writing is very good excepting when he gets too tired,” she has said to me. “Anyway it’s better than yours.”
It took me a moment to figure out that she was talking about handwriting. “That’s what “writing” has always meant around here.
- “Home”
1
1
39
For almost two years she had not taken any notice of the things that generally made people happy, such as nice weather or flowers in bloom or the smell of a bakery.
- “Dimensions”
1
6
38
On wet windy Sundays, snowy Sundays, sore-throat Sundays, I came out and sat in the United Church full of this unspeakable hope; that God would display Himself, to me at least, like a dome of light, a bubble radiant and indisputable above the modern pews.
- Lives of Girls & Women
1
3
38
She would look at herself in the glass and think: *wife, sweetheart*. Those mild lovely words. How could they apply to her? It was a miracle; it was a mistake. It was what she had dreamed of; it was not what she wanted.
- “The Beggar Maid”
2
2
38
All these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, *then* you’ll find yourself, in life.
- “Forgiveness in Families”
0
11
37
“Did you ever see that old Ingmar Bergman movie where there is a family living in a summer house on an island? A lovely shabby house. The girl was going crazy. I remember thinking at the time, That’s what summer houses should be like, and they never are.”
- “Lichen”
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All my life I found this is a good rule to follow – to get as much pleasure as you could out of things even when you weren't likely to be happy.
- “A Wilderness Station”
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36
There was a rule that nobody could be admitted during the month of December. The holiday season had so many emotional pitfalls.
- “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”
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4
36
Had she always been like this, always brash and greedy and scared; decent, maybe even admirable, but still somebody you hope you will not have to sit too long beside, on a bus or at a party?
- “Connection”
1
6
36
Our mother always asked afterwards if we had had a good time. I always said yes, and meant it, because I thought that if you went to a movie or to look at Lake Huron, or ate in a restaurant, that meant that you had had a good time.
- “Gravel”
3
4
35
Hazel drove all over the country to dances with other girls who worked in Kinkaid or taught school. On Sunday morning she got up with a hangover and took coffee with aspirin and put on her silk print dress and drove off down the road to sing in the choir.
- “A Trip to the Coast”
1
4
36
I got A’s at school. I never had enough of them. No sooner had I hauled one lot of them home with me than I had to start thinking of the next. They did seem to be tangible, and heavy as iron. I had them stacked around me like barricades.
- Lives of Girls and Women
1
2
36
And it was possible, too, that age could be her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen the look on the faces of certain old people – marooned on islands of their own choosing, clear sighted, content.
- “Deep-Holes”
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36
She felt as if she had been given a chance; she had started her life all over again. She’d walked out on her silver and her china and her decorating scheme and her flower garden and even on the books in her bookcase. She would live now, not read.
- “Gravel”
1
1
36
For almost two years she had not taken any notice of the things that generally made people happy, such as nice weather or flowers in bloom or the smell of a bakery.
- “Dimensions”
3
8
34
If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn’t bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself.
- “Night”
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0
35
Every week she brought her mother three new books from the library. Her mother liked the sight of a good thick book. A lot of reading in that one, she would say, just as she would say there was a lot of wear in a coat or blanket.
- “Accident”
0
5
35
“I want my stories to move people, I don’t care if they are men or women or children. I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn’t that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing.”
- Nobel Prize interview (2013)
1
10
34
She did not love him enough. She would say she loved him, and mean it to a certain extent, and she wanted to be loved by him, but there was a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time.
- “Post and Beam”
0
3
34
All these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, *then* you’ll find yourself, in life.
- “Forgiveness in Families”
1
8
33
“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.”
- “Gravel”
2
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33
How thoroughly we dealt with our fathers and mothers, deplored their marriages, their mistaken ambitions or fear of ambition, how competently we filed them away, defined them beyond any possibility of change. What presumption.
- “The Moons of Jupiter”
2
6
33
My father was so polite, even in the family. He took time to ask me how I was. Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
- “The Progress of Love”
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5
33
Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity. Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; *class*. Was this true, and was she foolish enough to care? It was; she was.
- “The Beggar Maid”
0
4
32
That was the kind of lie I hoped never to have to tell again, the contempt I hoped never to have to show, about the things that really mattered to me. And in order not to have to do that, I would pretty well have to stay clear of the people I used to know.
- “Family Furnishings”
1
8
32
Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.
-Lives of Girls and Women
0
7
31
She did not love him enough. She would say she loved him, and mean it to a certain extent, and she wanted to be loved by him, but there was a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time.
- “Post and Beam”
1
3
32
She sat in the kitchen for hours. It was an effort for her to move, even to make a cup of tea or go to the bathroom. Moving her body shook up the information that she was trying to arrange in her head and get used to.
- “The Love of a Good Woman”
0
4
30
It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.
- “Runaway”
2
6
30
“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.”
- interview with editor Alice Quinn (2001)
0
7
31
He shook the snow out. She scooped up some more and threw it at him. He didn’t laugh, he was surprised and alarmed. She brushed the snow off his eyebrows and licked it off his ears. She was laughing, though she felt desperate rather than merry.
- “The Beggar Maid”
1
1
29
I loved the volumes of the encyclopedia, their weight (of mystery, of beautiful information) as they fell open in my lap; I loved their sedate dark-green binding, the spidery, reticent-looking gold letters on their spines.
- Lives of Girls and Women
0
7
28
Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
- “The Progress of Love”
0
4
25
She brought milk for his coffee, and a plate of ginger cookies.
"Homemade," she said as she set the plate down. There was challenge rather than hospitality in her tone.
- "The Bear Came Over the Mountain"
4
1
27
People can accept almost any amount of ugliness if it is contained in a familiar formula, as it is on television, but when they come closer to their own place, their own lives, they are much offended by a lack of editing.
- “What Is Real?” (essay, 1982)
2
7
29
“There’s the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That’s the kind you’re supposed to get married on. Then there’s the kind that’s anything but intelligent, that’s like a possession. And that’s the one everybody really values.”
- “Hard-Luck Stories”
0
4
28
I got A’s at school. I never had enough of them. No sooner had I hauled one lot of them home with me than I had to start thinking of the next. They did seem to be tangible, and heavy as iron. I had them stacked around me like barricades.
- Lives of Girls and Women
0
7
29
She did not love him enough. She would say she loved him, and mean it to a certain extent, and she wanted to be loved by him, but there was a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time.
- “Post and Beam”
1
4
29
Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply.
- “Child’s Play”
2
6
28
“You live here? Are you the lady of the house?”
“I’m the hired girl.”
Some people change when they find that out, their whole way of looking at you and speaking to you changes, but his didn’t.
- “How I Met My Husband”
1
3
28
Our mother always asked afterwards if we had had a good time. I always said yes, and meant it, because I thought that if you went to a movie or to look at Lake Huron, or ate in a restaurant, that meant that you had had a good time.
- “Gravel”
0
5
28
I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by themselves.
- “Some Women”
1
4
27
With the runoff from the fields muddying the water and the pale sunlight on its surface, the river looked like butterscotch pudding on the boil. But if you fell into it, it would freeze your blood and fling you out into the lake.
- “The Love of a Good Woman”
0
6
27
Sex seemed to me all surrender – not the woman’s to the man but the person’s to the body, an act of pure faith, freedom in humility.
- Lives of Girls and Women
0
6
27
How thoroughly we dealt with our fathers and mothers, deplored their marriages, their mistaken ambitions or fear of ambition, how competently we filed them away, defined them beyond any possibility of change. What presumption.
- “The Moons of Jupiter”
0
4
26
When love is fresh and on the rise she grows mystical, tentative; in the time of love’s decline, and past the worst of it, she is brisk and entertaining, straightforward, analytical.
- “Bardon Bus”
1
5
26
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.
- "Accident"
0
2
25
We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.
- “Dear Life”
0
9
25
She sat in the kitchen for hours. It was an effort for her to move, even to make a cup of tea or go to the bathroom. Moving her body shook up the information that she was trying to arrange in her head and get used to.
- “The Love of a Good Woman”
2
4
26
At New Year’s she went to the dance in the Town Hall. The man who danced with her most often was the manager of the creamery – a man in his forties, never married, an excellent dancer, an avuncular friend to girls unlikely to find partners.
- “The Love of a Good Woman”
0
3
25
Around Christmastime my brother said to me that he thought we had the place in good enough shape now for him to be bringing in a wife, so we should have somebody to cook and do for us and milk a cow when we could afford one.
- “A Wilderness Station”
2
5
24
When I think of my parents in the time before they became my parents, they seem not only touching and helpless, marvellously deceived, but more attractive than at any later time.
- “Working for a Living”
0
7
25
Now the real winter has set in and the lake is frozen over almost all the way to the breakwater. The ice is rough, in some places it looks as if big waves had been frozen in place. Workmen are out taking down the Christmas lights.
- “Tricks”
0
2
25
It wasn’t much after three o’clock, but you could feel the darkness collecting, rising among the trees, like cold smoke coming off the snow.
- “Vandals”
0
1
25
He had shown an interest in her in the beginning but had told her he had never before seen a woman touch wine or spirits.
“It is for my health,” said Louisa gravely.
- “Carried Away”
2
3
25
Most writers probably underestimate their work, especially after it’s done. You don’t go around and tell your friends that I will probably win the Nobel Prize. That is not a common way of greeting one!
- Nobel Prize interview (2013)
1
5
25
In the evenings I read, I watch TV. No, that is not always true. Sometimes I sit in the dark, drinking whiskey & water, thinking uselessly and helplessly, almost comfortably, about things like this I had forgotten, or could not bear to think about for a long time.
"Executioners"
3
3
24
I went to look at the evening dresses in the window of Benbow’s Ladies’ Wear. Every week through the winter a new dress, spotlit – the sequins and tulle, the rose and lilac, sapphire, daffodil – and me a cold worshipper on the slushy sidewalk.
- “The Moons Of Jupiter”
0
4
25
The snowbanks were high, the road went like a tunnel between. Under the fresh snow were boulders of old snow, hard and gray. Ribbons of dog urine ran down by the shoveled paths.
- "Executioners"
0
3
25
Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late-afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows.
- “Family Furnishings”
1
7
25
If ever I am seriously ill I hope I am able to destroy this diary or go through and stroke out any mean things in it, in case I die.
- “Powers”
1
2
23
And it was possible, too, that age could be her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen the look on the faces of certain old people – marooned on islands of their own choosing, clear sighted, content.
- “Deep-Holes”
0
1
25
Next day, or the day after, when I was reading as usual on the couch, I felt myself drop a lovely distance, thinking of you, and that was the beginning, I suppose, the realization of what more there could still be.
- “Tell Me Yes or No”
1
4
24
She used to be such a stately girl, not very forthcoming. In fact not very friendly, or so he had thought. And now she was scurrying and chattering in the way of people who were too much alone.
- “Jakarta”
0
1
23
Had she always been like this, always brash and greedy and scared; decent, maybe even admirable, but still somebody you hope you will not have to sit too long beside, on a bus or at a party?
- “Connection”
1
5
24
She knew what it was to wait in a bar for a man who never showed up. To wait for letters, to cry in public, and on the other hand to be pestered by a man she no longer wanted.
- “Vandals”
0
4
24
And I thought then, Just living long enough wipes out the problems. Puts you in a select club. No matter what your disabilities may have been, just living till now wipes them out, to a good measure. Everybody’s face will have suffered, never just yours.
- “Pride”
1
3
24
When we came out of the Turkey Barn it was snowing. Lily said it was like a Christmas card, and so it was, with the snow whirling around the street lights in town and around the colored lights people had put up outside their doorways.
- “The Turkey Season”
2
5
23
Spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long, brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were.
- Lives of Girls and Women
0
3
24
She was talking about the time that they had gone out skiing at night under the full moon and over the black-striped snow, in this place that you could get into only in the depths of winter. They had heard the branches cracking in the cold.
- “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”
0
2
24
There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through eyes other than my own.
- “Family Furnishings”
1
1
24
Never underestimate the meanness there is in people’s souls.
- “Before the Change”
1
8
24
There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls & women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals.
-Lives of Girls & Women
#IWD2023
1
7
23
She hadn't got fatter or thinner, her looks had not deteriorated in any alarming way, but nevertheless she had stopped being one sort of woman and had become another, and she had noticed it on this trip.
- "Dulse"
0
0
24
Whatever it is that ordinary people lose when they are drunk, Milton Homer never had, or might have chosen not to have – and that is what interests Rose – at some point early in life.
- “Who Do You Think You Are?”
2
6
23
She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to him like that of the stems of cut flowers left too long in their water.
- “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”
0
1
24
Rocks, trees, water, snow. These things, constantly rearranged, made up the scene six months ago, outside the train window on a morning between Christmas and New Year’s.
- “Chance”
0
4
24
Gabriel told me that he enjoyed life. I was embarrassed for him. I never believed people who said such things and anyway, I associated that statement with gross, self-advertising, secretly unpleasantly restless men.
- “Material”
0
4
24
My love did not of course melt away altogether as the season changed. My daydreams continued, but were derived from the past. They had nothing new to feed on.
- Lives of Girls and Women
0
3
24
Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late-afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows.
- “Family Furnishings”
0
6
24
I had thought how men are charmed by stubborn quirks if the girl is good-looking enough. Of course that has gone out of fashion. At least I hope it has. All that delight in the infantile female brain.
- "Dolly"
0
3
23