350 Quotes by Alice Munro

I was young, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm.

They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy.

I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough.

Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry.

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.

Greta moved on. She kept smiling. Nobody looked at her with any recognition or pleasure and why should they? People’s eyes slid round her and then they went on with their conversations. They laughed. Everybody but Greta was equipped with friends, jokes, half-secrets, everybody appeared to have found somebody to welcome them.

Maybe it’s an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can’t help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn’t such a muddle.

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft – a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.