"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 ..."
- Alice Munro
"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 into the store..."
"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..."
"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."
"I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got pa..."
"Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid and have it taken from you."
"I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it..."
"To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb."
"Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?"
"I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me."