350 Quotes by Alice Munro

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail.

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.

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

That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

The only choice I make is to write about what interests me in a way that interests me, that gives me pleasure. It may not look like pleasure, because the difficulties can make me morose and distracted, but that’s what it is – the pleasure of telling the story I mean to tell as wholly as I can tell it, of finding out in fact what that story is, by working around the different ways of telling it.

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.

But I hope you will – use your brains. Use your brains. Don’t be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being – distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.

Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.

If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.