Alice Munro Quotes

Inferiority is what you enjoy in your best friends.

From the minute we're born, boys and girls stare at each other, trying to figure out if they like what they see. Like parade lines, passing each other for mutual inspection. You march, you look. You march, you look. If you're interested, you stop and talk, and if it doesn't work out, you just get back in the parade. You keep marching, and you keep looking.

The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying.

Whenever two people come together and their behavior affects one another, you have etiquette.

Women tell men things that men are not very likely to find out for themselves.

[Women] are early taught that to appear to yield is the only way to govern.

Etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them.

A woman's head is always influenced by her heart, but a man's heart is always influenced by his head.

The way you see people is the way you treat them.

Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.

We often live in the past a lot more than we probably realize.

Society becomes how you behave.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

Sometimes chemistry does the trick, and other times, you have to forge that with the people.

Women are sort of like motorcycle gangs with me. They get really shy and polite. I don't know why.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;Girls aren't like that.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

Men are less forgiving than women.

Oh, I know all about my mother and me,' you may say. 'All that business with my mother was over years ago.' You don't and it wasn't.

With women you don't have to talk your head off. You just say a word and let them fill in from there.

Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.

You just can't win. Men have very recent land mines in their heads. Women have recorded conversations and photographs in their heads from 15 years ago.

The nature of bad news affects the teller.