Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

Alice Munro in the Paris Review, 1994

 The vigilance has to be there all the time. Of course it wouldn’t matter if you did give up writing. It’s not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It’s the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write. This is what I wonder: what do most people do once the necessity of working all the time is removed? Even the retired people who take courses and have hobbies are looking for something to fill this void, and I feel such horror of being like that and having that kind of life. The only thing that I’ve ever had to fill my life has been writing.

Alice Munro, "Open Secrets"

 You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

Alice Munro, "Too Much Happiness"

 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.

Alice Munro, "Dance of the Happy Shades"

 The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

 “There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It's true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.”

-- Del's mother

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

 Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

Alice Munro, "Lives of Girls and Women"

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.

Alice Munro, "Wenlock Edge"

 I had a mean tongue.

But I meant no harm. Or hardly any harm.

Alice Munro, "Face"

I am convinced that my father looked at me, really saw me, only once. After that, he knew what was there.

Alice Munro, "Some Women"

 I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in summer, and when girls wore waist cinchers and crinolines that could stand up by themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio and leukemia. Some people who got polio got better, crippled or not, but people with leukemia went to bed, and, after some weeks’ or months’ decline in a tragic atmosphere, they died.

Alice Munro, "The Spanish Lady" [first posted 2005]

 Why is it a surprise that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?