Alice Munro
Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munrois a Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize winner. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 July 1931
CountryCanada
stories failing importance
The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
love beautiful girl
She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn't altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn't shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men - people, everybody - thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she'd be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.
past thinking years
I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.
world wells remove
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
kissing fearless conversation
The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
notebook reading knowing
People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
letting-go grief minutes
Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
writing trying want
There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.
reading house stories
I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
beats
It’s just life. You can’t beat life.
happened
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.
forgiveness forgiving forgiven
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.
moving mean writing
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, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.
people would-be ifs
Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.