Alice Munro Quotes

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

This can't be true but I remember it.

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

Sometimes when you get older — and I’m not talking about you, I’m talking generally, because everyone ages differently — things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they’re part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they’re not true — why, then you get offended because you can’t remember the first part. All you know is that you’ve been called a liar.

That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is complete. She is a willful child; all her toys are broken. I remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I was there still.

We're not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion - they believe they always thought that.

The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things that it pointed to, content to believe that at least in this version things worked for her better than they did in the one I never heard.

You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

You grew up way too fast and now there's nothing to believe; and re-runs all become our history.

You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?

I'm all out o faith, this is how I feel. I'm cold and I am shamed lying naked on the floor. Illusions never change into something real. I'm wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn. You're a little late, I'm already torn.

No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

In the real world there's an after-effect of disappointment if you lose an argument. But if, to begin with, you're set up not to have this particular autonomy, then you're not disappointed.

Memory is a great betrayer.

How do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?

This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.

The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them