350 Quotes by Alice Munro

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.

Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?

Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both.

Children Katy’s age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.

You remember your history?” He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, “Not altogether.

It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better.

And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble – the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.

If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.