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Alice Munro

Alice Munro Books

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Dear Life

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No Love Lost

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Open Secrets

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Away from Her

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Runaway

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“گريس نمي توانست توضيح بدهد يا درست بفهمد كه آنچه احساس مي كرد دو هم رفته حسادت نبود، خشم بود٠ دليلش هم اين نبود كه نمي توانست آن طوري خريد كند يا لباس بپوشد٠ اين بود كه از دخترها توقع داشتند اين جوري باشند٠ مردها، مردم، همه آدم ها، فكر مي كردند دختر بايد اين جوري باشد٠ خوشگل، عزيزدردانه، ننر، خودخواه، با مغزي به اندازه نخود٠ دختر بايد اين جوري باشد تا بشود عاشقش شد. بعد مادر مي شد و خودش را با سوز و گداز وقف بچه هايش مي كرد٠ ديگر خودخواه نبود، فقط مغزش همچنان به قد نخود بود٠ تا ابد٠”

ExperienceGirls
Book:Runaway: Stories
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“And I thought, all these things don't seem that much like life, when you're doing them, they're just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you'll find yourself, then you'll find yourself, in life. It's not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you're comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you're dying, Mother is dying, and it's just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you're had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O God doesn't it, you'd break your heart wanting back there.”

LifeAgeDeathDyingContentmentAgeingGratefulnessExpectation
Book:Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
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“Then he said the funny thing was the old man himself had left home when he was a kid, after a fight with his own father. The father lit into him for using the wheelbarrow. "It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. That's the peasant thinking for you.”

PovertyConservatismParochialismBackwardness
Book:A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994
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“What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old. It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something which would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one. So, nothing now but what she or anybody else could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for, nothing secret, or strange. Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious... It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old and new to bargaining.”

HomeMotherMarriageWife
Book:Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
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“I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion, a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily and bountifully that even if it is rejected he can move along as buoyantly as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that, inexperienced as I was. Just a person who took comfort in the moment and in a sort of reasonable façade of life.”

MenLoveLifeRelationships
Book:Queenie: A Story
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“I thought about Mother’s life, the part of it I knew. Going to work every day, first on the ferry then on the bus. Shopping at the old Red-and-White then at the new Safeway - new, fifteen years old! Going down to the Library one night a week, taking me with her, and we would come home on the bus with our load of books and a bag of grapes we bought at a Chinese place, for a treat. Wednesday afternoons too when my kids were small and I went over there to drink coffee and she rolled us cigarettes on that contraption she had. And I thought, all these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, then you’ll find yourself, in life. It’s not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, youre comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you’re dying, Mother is dying, and it’s just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you’ve had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O god doesn’t it, you’d break your heart wanting back there.”

Death Of A Loved One
Author:Alice Munro
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“She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking to new people, living among hordes of people every day who were not Clark. A life, a place, chosen for that specific reason––that it would not contain Clark. The strange and terrible thing coming clear to her about that world of the future, as she now pictured it, was that she would not exist there. She would only walk around, and open her mouth and speak, and do this and do that. She would not really be there. And what was strange about it was that she was doing all this, she was riding on this bus in the hope of recovering herself. As Mrs. Jamieson might say––and as she herself might with satisfaction have said––taking charge of her own life. With nobody glowering over her, nobody's mood infecting her with misery. But what would she care about? How would she know that she was alive? While she was running away from him––now––Clark still kept his place in her life. But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place? What else––who else––could ever be so vivid a challenge?”

RegretInertiaAbusive Relationships
Book:Runaway: Stories
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“The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid, of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on and on and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.”

GriefMothers
Book:Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
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“Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst.”

MemoriesChildhoodNostalgiaCanadaJog Your Memory
Book:The View From Castle Rock
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“It occurred to him, and had occurred to him before, that there was after all something to be said for dealing with things the way most people of his age seemed to do. It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangement had altered.”

AgeChangeProgressIgnoranceMaturityAgeingAlice Munro
Book:Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
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“El Mundo me considera un Monstruo y no tengo nada en contra de eso, aunque de paso podría decir que a los que sueltan bombas o queman ciudades o matan de hambre o asesinan a cientos de miles de personas normalmente no se los considera Monstruos sino que les llueven medallas y honores, pues solo los actos contra pocas personas se consideran malos y terribles. Lo cual no es una excusa sino una simple observación.”

MaldadMounstro
Book:Too Much Happiness: Stories
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“People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? They will become a part of the block, a part of the street, part of everybody's map of the town, and eventually of everybody's memories. They will sit and drink coffee in the middle of the morning, they will get out the familiar bits of tinsel at Christmas, they will wash the windows in spring before spreading out the new stock. Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else - a refuge and a justification.”

ShopsRefuge
Book:Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories
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“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.”

WritingStoriesBooksDiscoveryExplorationCreative Process
Book:Selected Stories
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“Estaba aprendiendo, con bastante retraso, lo que muchas personas de su entorno parecían saber desde la infancia: que la vida puede ser plena sin grandes éxitos. Podía rebosar de actividades que no te dejaran exhausta. Adquirir lo necesario para una vida cómoda y después llevar una vida pública y social de entretenimiento te evita el aburrimiento e incluso la ociosidad, y al final del día tienes la sensación de haber hecho exactamente lo que complace a todo el mundo. Sin necesidad de angustiarse.”

FelicidadSimplicidad
Book:Too Much Happiness: Stories
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“Pensé que, salvo yo, no había nadie vivo en el mundo que supiera eso, que pudiera establecer la relación. Y que yo sería la última en establecerla. Pero quizás no es así. Las personas son curiosas. Algunas personas lo son. Se ven impulsadas a averiguar cosas, incluso cosas triviales. Recopilan cosas. Se les ve yendo ahí con libretas, rascando la suciedad de las lápidas, leyendo microfilmes, solo con la esperanza de ver un goteo en el tiempo, de establecer una relación, de rescatar una cosa de la basura.”

CuriosityCuriosidad
Book:Friend of My Youth
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“Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence, Everywhere an insult in your face. As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed, more of life.”

Nobel PrizeContemporary FictionDear LifeCanadian FictionMunro
Book:Dear Life
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“It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.”

PeopleIfsThinkingWantWritingDifferentEndsMightAbleYoungTurnsResultsToo MuchOne DayMountainQuittingAdviseParalyzedYoung WritersWrong TurnDrivel
Author:Alice Munro
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“In dreams you can have the feeling that you've had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it's really nothing that simple. You know that there's a whole underground system that you call 'dreams,' having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar - where you are now, where you've always been.”

KnowsWholeFeelingsDreamBodySimpleFamiliarWhere You AreUnpredictableTunnelsStretching
Book:Friend of my youth: stories
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“I would ... go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. ... Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. ... If there were woman all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.”

IfsYearsMadeWaitingJourneyHairGoes OnOne DayLettersBusyStartingGrassGrayMailboxes
Author:Alice Munro
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“Luck took me right out of myself - I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks' sake; so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn't really look at anything. Well - this does.”

WellsLooksDoeTurnsFictionLet MeClaimsResponsibleLuckSakeTricksFancySpiteSatisfyingSurprisingPuzzlesShiftingDiversionLet Me Down
Author:Alice Munro
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