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

And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.

— Alice Munro

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

— Alice Munro

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.

— Alice Munro

Aunt Else and Auntie Grace stood in their doorway, ceremoniously, to watch me go, and I felt as if I were a ship with their hope on it, dropping over the horizon.

— Alice Munro

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, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.

— Alice Munro

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. Furthermore, it is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces, or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets.

— Alice Munro

Doing this was like wading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted on a stream of steely devotion—calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body.

— Alice Munro

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

— Alice Munro

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.

— Alice Munro