Lauren > Lauren's Quotes

“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, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories

“There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.”
― Alice Munro

“Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again. ”
― Alice Munro, Away from Her

“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.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness

“Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?”
― Alice Munro

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
― Alice Munro

“This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

This is what happens.

...

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.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories

“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

“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.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“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.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. ”
― Alice Munro, Away from Her

“Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.”
― Alice Munro, The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose

“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.
”
― Alice Munro

“Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.”
― Alice Munro

“For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief. ”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.”
― Alice Munro

“My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“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".”
― Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories

“The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.”
― Alice Munro, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

“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 the great unhappiness of another.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?”
― Alice Munro, Dear Life

“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 phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.”
― Alice Munro, Selected Stories

“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 back off, they held bitterly to principles.

Can't you tolerate people being different, why is this so important?
If this isn't important, nothing is.

The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went to bed speechless, parted speechless the next morning, and during the day were overtaken by fear - hers that he would never come home, his that when he did she would not be there. Their luck held, however. They came together in the late afternoon pale with contrition, shaking with love, like people who had narrowly escaped an earthquake and had been walking around in naked desolation.”
― Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

“And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.”
― Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

“There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.”
― Alice Munro