The constant happiness is curiosity.
The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.
Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
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.
You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
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.
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.
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.
She would live now, not read.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.
There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.
What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".
Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.
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.
Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.
He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.
There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
It’s just life. You can’t beat life.
I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
There are people who carry decency and optimism around with them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can't tell such people things, it is too disruptive.
I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.
The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.
Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places
Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.
People who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one
And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?
One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.
And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence. 'If I loved you I would have written differently.
One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them.
Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I've never been there, isn't that a good enough reason?
All these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center.
Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead.
....Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation…subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to…
Algo había ocurrido allí. En la vida tienes unos cuantos sitios, o quizá uno solo, donde ocurrió algo, y después están todos los demás sitios.
For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?
None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade.
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.
He seemed happy. She thought that she seldom concerned herself about Laurence’s being happy. She wanted him to be in a good mood, so that everything would go smoothly, but that was not the same thing.
There were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.
Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle— And hoping It will reach Japan.
A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks
My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.
A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.
He could no more describe the feeling he got from her than you can describe a smell. It's like the scorch of electricity. It's like burnt kernels of wheat. No, it's like a bitter orange. I give up.
Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story." [A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]
Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry.
He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.
It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love... the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.
The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.
You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said - that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question.
What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.
A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.
She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.
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.
She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...
He says the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?
They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable.
It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation
What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee.
Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.
If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.
You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.
I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me.
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.
In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are the other places, which are just other places.
Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?
Life is always so full. Getting and spending we lay waste to our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do?
People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want? It was too polite, I said.
Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity.
