89 Inspiring Quotes By Alice Munro, The Author Of Open Secrets
Alice Ann Munro is a short story writer from Canada, who is credited for revolutionizing the craft of writing a short story and has won the highest literary awards for the body of work that she has churned out over a period of several decades. Munro has been an active short story writer from an early age and her first story, ‘The Dimensions of a Shadow’, was published when she was still only a teenager. She attended the University of Western Ontario to study journalism and English. Her first short story collection, ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’ was published in 1968 and won her an award. From then on she went from strength to strength as she reeled off many more short story collections over the years; notable among them being ‘Lives of Girls and Women’, ‘Friend of My Youth’, ‘The Moons of Jupiter’, ‘Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You’ and ‘Open Secrets’ among others. Munro introduced a new style of short stories in which the narrative is non-linear in nature and that was something that made her stories truly remarkable. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for her efforts. Here are some of her most well-known quotes.
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.
