I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion, a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily and bountifully that even if it is rejected he can move along as buoyantly as ever? Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that, inexperienced as I was. Just a person who took comfort at the moment and in a sort of reasonable façade of life.

— Alice Munro

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

— Alice Munro

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

— Alice Munro

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she is so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

— Alice Munro

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 a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumac jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blythe--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Roderick. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskox in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Lakehurst.

— Alice Munro

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

— Alice Munro

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. Furthermore, I wish that everything had gone differently.

— Alice Munro

She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking to new people, living among hordes of people every day who were not Clark. A life, a place, chosen for that specific reason––that it would not contain

— 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...

— Alice Munro

She smiled at me with such merriment of recognition, and such a yearning to be recognized in return, that you would think this was a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.

— Alice Munro