Alice Munro Quotes

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

When everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself.

I'm nobody, who are you?

Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.

All my life I've felt quite misunderstood because of my personality.

When we are away from home, our only constant companion is our self.

Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.

Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.

Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

I would much rather sit, dimmed by inattention, and study the atmosphere and the silence and dance between people, but often times I’m not offered this privilege. The necessity for isolation, and the striving for popularity is the only contradiction I find in being a writer and an actress.

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

I can understand other people's situations in their own terms, but I still can't understand mine.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.

...the most serious thing, and the strangest, is that we are afraid to the point of panic, not so much of seeing ourselves as of being seen by ourselves. This is our root absurdity. What is behind this great fear?

If you find yourself running away from something and then suddenly you're isolated in a vacuum, then you have to deal with all the inherent truths and learning things about yourself and the people that are around you.

Me, myself and I. That's all I got in the end.