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
house stories world
A story is not like a road to followit's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
country ironic stories
I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.
way stories ive-learned
The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
shelter stories sturdy
A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
memories people stories
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
stories failing importance
The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
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.
past want looks
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".
self people diaries
I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
eye turkeys eggs
What if people really did that - sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.
lust everyday skins
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
children awkward aversion
Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.
done care might
I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.
flower eye home
There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.