Alice Munro Quotes

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

I never define depression, clinical or otherwise. It's the basis of most life, it seems to me, in the modern world. We're all depressed.

Men are not put into this world to be everlastingly played on by the harping fingers of joy.

A person cannot make another happy, but he can make him unhappy. This is the main reason why there is more unhappiness than happiness in the world.

It's all emotion. But there's nothing wrong with emotion. When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are on vacation, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are happy, we are not [rational]. In fact, in more cases than not, when we are rational, we're actually unhappy. Emotion is good; passion is good. Being into what we're into, provided that it's a healthy pursuit, it's a good thing.

Most people here don't have a wide emotional range. It's just the type of people astronauts are, they're required to be level.

The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.

We believe that it takes a strong back and a soft front to face the world.

It's hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.

If only everyone could know and live with their inner craziness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier.

The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.

.. But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way, in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness

I'm a Jewish boy from Jersey. I was born with a strong sense of right and wrong, and a strong sense that the world can be a ludicrous, unfair, inhumane place.

You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

There are no greater wretches in the world than many of those whom people in general take to be happy.

One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low.

Authentic happiness is not linked to an activity; it is a state of being, a profound emotional balance struck by a subtle understanding of how the mind functions.

To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.

If I've had a bad day, if I'm feeling stressed out, if I'm feeling overwhelmed - it takes it all away. It's my antidote for everything. If I feel any sort of emotional upheaval, I go for a jog and I feel better.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one's soul aloft.

Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.