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Friday, July 10, 2026
“His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and
sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never
saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything
then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch
or explain.”
―
Lives of Girls and Women
“The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.” ― Alice Munro, Dear Life
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.”
―
Runaway: Stories
“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.”
―
Too Much Happiness: Stories
“A final word. Curious. Many years of reading many books has led me to a
somewhat bizarre literary critical theory, namely that all significant
texts are distinguished by the preponderance of a single word. In
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland that word is ‘curious’ (In The Brothers
Karamazov it’s ‘ecstasy’, but that needn’t concern us here.) The word
‘curious’ appears so frequently in Carroll’s text that it becomes a kind
of tocsin awakening us from our reverie. But it isn’t the strangeness
of Alice’s Wonderland that it reminds us of-it’s the bizarre
incomprehensibility of our own.”
―
“Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.”
“A story is not like a road to follow … it'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 is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
“You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you
feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the
awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no
matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to
the real business of writing and should be cherished.”
―