Well, lucky I can do anything at all.

He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want?It was too polite, I said.

A los hombres les encantan las rarezas cuando la chica es lo suficientemente bonita

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...

Y Doree se preguntó por qué tenía que importarle lo que Maggie pensara. Maggie era una extraña, ni siquiera se sentía a gusto con ella. Fue Lloyd quien lo dijo, y tenía razón.

You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something...

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide – sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the...

I don’t take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking mesomewhere… I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it...

It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation

Doing this was likewading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement thatyou were still moving, lifted up on a stream of...

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you’ve been driving for a long time — you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of...

Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.

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.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.”[A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]

It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even...

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a...

She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed...

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness–however temporary, however flimsy–of one person could come out of...

Now I no longer believe that people’s secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

Cuando estás fatal es cuando intentan pillarte.

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...

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store… He had not even had time to get...

A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would...

Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further every night on the deck. (Averill often told herself stories– the activity seemed to her as unavoidable as dreaming.) Her...

For what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity?

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...

I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they...

Children use that word “hate” to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened…It is not physical harm that is feared…so much as some spell, or dark intention. It is a feeling you...

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

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.

He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

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,...

Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person.