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I Began To Understand That There Were Certain Talkers - Certain Girls - Whom People Liked To Listen To, Not Because Of What They, The Girls, Had To Say, But Because Of The Delight They Took In Saying It. A Delight In Themselves, A Shine On Their Faces, A Conviction That Whatever They Were Telling About Was Remarkable And That They Themselves Could Not Help But Give Pleasure. There Might Be Other People - People Like Me - Who Didn't Concede This, But That Was Their Loss. And People Like Me Would Never Be The Audience These Girls Were After, Anyway.

-Alice Munro

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I Began To Understand

Alice Munro

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I Began To Understand That There Were Certain Talkers - Certain Girls - Whom People Liked To Listen To, Not Because Of What They, The Girls, Had To Say, But Because Of The Delight They Took In Saying It. A Delight In Themselves, A Shine On Their Faces, A Conviction That Whatever They Were Telling About Was Remarkable And That They Themselves Could Not Help But Give Pleasure. There Might Be Other People - People Like Me - Who Didn't Concede This, But That Was Their Loss. And People Like Me Would Never Be The Audience These Girls Were After, Anyway.

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Sometimes Our Connection Is Frayed, It Is In Danger, It Seems Almost Lost. Views And Streets Deny Knowledge Of Us, The Air Grows Thin. Wouldn't We Rather Have A Destiny To Submit To, Than, Something That Claims Us, Anything, Instead Of Such Flimsy Choices, Arbitrary Days?

The Skin Of Everyday Appearances Stretched Over Such Shamelessness, Such Consuming Explosions Of Lust.

I Can't Play Bridge. I Don't Play Tennis. All Those Things That People Learn, And I Admire, There Hasn't Seemed Time For. But What There Is Time For Is Looking Out The Window.

I Used To Feel For Years And Years And Years That I Was Very Remiss Not To Have Written A Novel And I Would Question People Who Wrote Novels And Try To Find Out How They Did It And How They Had Got Past Page 30. Then, With The Approach Of Old Age, I Began To Just Think: “well, Lucky I Can Do Anything At All.

It’s Just Life. You Can’t Beat Life.

It Must Have Meant Something, Though, That At This Turn Of My Life I Grabbed Up A Book. Because It Was In Books That I Would Find, For The Next Few Years, My Lovers. They Were Men, Not Boys. They Were Self-possessed And Sardonic, With A Ferocious Streak In Them, Reserves Of Gloom.

She Keeps On Hoping From A Word From Penelope, But Not In Any Strenuous Way. She Hopes As People Who Know Better Hope For Undeserved Blessings, Spontaneous Remissions, Things Of That Sort.

It Was At This Time That She Entirely Gave Up On Reading. The Covers Of Books Looked Like Coffins To Her, Either Shabby Or Ornate, And What Was Inside Them Might As Well Have Been Dust.

I Felt In Him What Women Feel In Men, Something So Tender, Swollen, Tyrannical, Absurd; I Would Never Take The Consequences Of Interfering With It.

The Story Fails But Your Faith In The Importance Of Doing The Story Doesn't Fail.

Speculation Can Be More Gentle, Can Take Its Time, When It Is Not Driven By Desire.

I Want My Stories To Move People ... To Feel Some Kind Of Reward From The Writing.

What If People Really Did That - Sent Their Love Through The Mail To Get Rid Of It? What Would It Be That They Sent? A Box Of Chocolates With Centers Like The Yolks Of Turkey Eggs. A Mud Doll With Hollow Eye Sockets. A Heap Of Roses Slightly More Fragrant Than Rotten. A Package Wrapped In Bloody Newspaper That Nobody Would Want To Open.

That's Something I Think Is Growing On Me As I Get Older: Happy Endings.

Who Can Ever Say The Perfect Thing To The Poet About His Poetry?

And Now Such A Warm Commotion, Such Busy Love.

Children Of Course Are Monstrously Conventional, Repelled At Once By Whatever Is Off-center, Out Of Whack, Unmanageable. And Being An Only Child I Had Been Coddled A Good Deal (also Scolded). I Was Awkward, Precocious, Timid, Full Of My Private Rituals And Aversions.

Naturally My Stories Are About Women - I'm A Woman. I Don't Know What The Term Is For Men Who Write Mostly About Men. I'm Not Always Sure What Is Meant By "feminist." In The Beginning I Used To Say, Well, Of Course I'm A Feminist. But If It Means That I Follow A Kind Of Feminist Theory, Or Know Anything About It, Then I'm Not. I Think I'm A Feminist As Far As Thinking That The Experience Of Women Is Important. That Is Really The Basis Of Feminism.

People Have Thoughts They’d Sooner Not Have. It Happens In Life.

I Would ... Go Up To The Mailbox And Sit In The Grass, Waiting. ... Till It Came To Me One Day There Were Women Doing This With Their Lives, All Over. There Were Women Just Waiting And Waiting By Mailboxes For One Letter Or Another. I Imagined Me Making This Journey Day After Day And Year After Year, And My Hair Starting To Go Gray, And I Thought, I Was Never Made To Go On Like That. ... If There Were Woman All Through Life Waiting, And Women Busy And Not Waiting, I Knew Which I Had To Be.

Things Have Changed, Ofcourse. There Are Counsellors At The Ready. Kindness And Understanding. Life Is Harder For Some, We're Told. Not Their Fault, Even If The Blows Are Purely Imgainery. Felt Just As Keenly By The Recipient, Or The Non Recipient, As The Case May Be. But Good Use Can Be Made Of Everything, If You Are Willing.

Hatred Is Always A Sin, My Mother Told Me. Remember That. One Drop Of Hatred In Your Soul Will Spread And Discolor Everything Like A Drop Of Black Ink In White Milk. I Was Struck By That And Meant To Try It, But Knew I Shouldn’t Waste The Milk.

I Loved Taking Off. In My Own House, I Seemed To Be Often Looking For A Place To Hide - Sometimes From The Children But More Often From The Jobs To Be Done And The Phone Ringing And The Sociability Of The Neighborhood. I Wanted To Hide So That I Could Get Busy At My Real Work, Which Was A Sort Of Wooing Of Distant Parts Of Myself.

Memory Is The Way We Keep Telling Ourselves Our Stories - And Telling Other People A Somewhat Different Version Of Our Stories.

The Constant Happiness Is Curiosity.

Inspirational Life

He Never Wanted To Be Away From Her. She Had The Spark Of Life.

I Just Believed It Easily, The Way You Might Believe And In Fact Remember That You Once Had Another Set Of Teeth, Now Vanished But Real In Spite Of That. Until One Day, One Day When I May Even Have Been In My Teens, I Knew With A Dim Sort Of Hole In My Insides That Now I Didn't Believe It Anymore.

One Drop Of Hatred In Your Soul Will Spread And Discolor Everything Like A Drop Of Black Ink In White Milk.

I Knew I Would Be Famous One Day. That's Because I Lived In A Very Small Town And Nobody Liked Doing The Same Things I Did, Like Writing.

As Soon As A Man And Woman Of Almost Any Age Are Alone Together Within Four Walls It Is Assumed That Anything May Happen. Spontaneous Combustion, Instant Fornication, Triumph Of The Senses. What Possibilities Men And Women Must See In Each Other To Infer Such Dangers. Or, Believing In The Dangers, How Often They Must Think About The Possibilities.

I Have Never Kept Diaries. I Just Remember A Lot And Am More Self-centered Than Most People.

Writing Is Hard, But The More You Write, And Enjoy What You Write, The Better It Gets.

If I Decided To Send This To You, Where Would I Send It? When I Think Of Writing The Whole Address On The Envelope I Am Paralyzed. It's Too Painful To Think Of You In The Same Place With Your Life Going On In The Same Way, Minus Me. And To Think Of You Not There, You Somewhere Else But I Don't Know Where That Is, Is Worse.

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. I Wish That Everything Had Gone Differently.

Luck Took Me Right Out Of Myself - I Read It In One Gulp, And It Never Let Me Down. Sharp And Surprising But Always Responsible, No Tricks For Tricks' Sake; So Satisfying, With Its Shifting And Puzzles. So Much Fiction Turns Out To Be Diversion, In Spite Of Fancy Claims, And Doesn't Really Look At Anything. Well - This Does.

This Is The Day Of Wonders. The Land Is Covered With Trees Like A Head With Hair And Behind The Ship The Sun Rises Tipping The Top Trees With Light. The Sky Is Clear And Shining As A China Plate And The Water Playfully Ruffled With Wind. Every Wisp Of Fog Is Gone And The Air Is Full Of The Resinous Smell Of The Trees. Seabirds Are Flashing Above The Sails Golden Like Creatures From Heaven, But The Sailors Raise A Few Shots To Keep Them From The Rigging.

She Was Learning, Quite Late, What Many People Around Her Appeared To Have Known Since Childhood That Life Can Be Perfectly Satisfying Without Major Achievements.

I Began To Understand That There Were Certain Talkers - Certain Girls - Whom People Liked To Listen To, Not Because Of What They, The Girls, Had To Say, But Because Of The Delight They Took In Saying It. A Delight In Themselves, A Shine On Their Faces, A Conviction That Whatever They Were Telling About Was Remarkable And That They Themselves Could Not Help But Give Pleasure. There Might Be Other People - People Like Me - Who Didn't Concede This, But That Was Their Loss. And People Like Me Would Never Be The Audience These Girls Were After, Anyway.

Now I No Longer Believe That People's Secrets Are Defined And Communicable, Or Their Feelings Full-blown And Easy To Recognize.

But I Never Cleaned Thoroughly Enough, My Reorganization Proved To Be Haphazard, The Disgraces Came Unfailingly To Light, And It Was Clear How We Failed, How Disastrously We Fell Short Of That Ideal Of Order And Cleanliness, Household Decency Which I As Much As Anybody Else Believed In.

People Are Curious. A Few People Are. ... They Will Put Things Together, Knowing All Along That They May Be Mistaken. You See Them Going Around With Notebooks, Scraping The Dirt Off Gravestones, Reading Microfilm, Just In The Hope Of Seeing This Trickle In Time, Making A Connection, Rescuing One Thing From The Rubbish.

A Story Is Not Like A Road To Follow... It's More Like A House. You Go Inside And Stay There For A While, Wandering Back And Forth And Settling Where You Like And Discovering How The Room And Corridors Relate To Each Other, How The World Outside It Altered By Being Viewed From These Windows.

What She Wants To Do If She Can Get The Time To Do It, Is Not So Much To Live In The Past As To Open It Up And Get One Good Look At It".

Every Year, When You're A Child, You Become A Different Person.

It Almost Seemed As If There Must Be Some Random And Of Course Unfair Thrift In The Emotional Housekeeping Of The World, If The Great Happiness--however Temporary, However Flimsy--of One Person Could Come Out Of The Great Unhappiness Of Another.

The Unhappiest Moment I Could Never Tell You. All Our Fights Blend Into Each Other And Are In Fact Re-enactments Of The Same Fight, In Which We Punish Each Other--i With Words, Hugh With Silence--for Being Each Other. We Never Needed Any More Than That.

Usually, I Have A Lot Of Acquaintance With The Story Before I Start Writing It. When I Didn't Have Regular Time To Give To Writing, Stories Would Just Be Working In My Head For So Long That When I Started To Write I Was Deep Into Them. Now, I Do That Work By Filling Notebooks.

Always Remember That When A Man Goes Out Of The Room, He Leaves Everything In It Behind. When A Woman Goes Out She Carries Everything That Happened In The Room Along With Her.

Few People, Very Few, Have A Treasure, And If You Do You Must Hang Onto It. You Must Not Let Yourself Be Waylaid, And Have It Taken From You.

The Thing Is To Be Happy, No Matter What. Just Try That. You Can. It Gets To Be Easier And Easier. It's Nothing To Do With Circumstances. You Wouldn't Believe How Good It Is. Accept Everything And Then Tragedy Disappears. Or Tragedy Lightens, Anyway, You're Just There, Going Along Easy In The World.

You Cannot Let Your Parents Anywhere Near Your Real Humiliations.

When I Told Him On The Phone That After All You And I Would Not Be Getting Married, He Said "oh-oh. Do You Think You'll Ever Manage To Get Another One?" If I'd Objected To His Saying That He Would Naturally Have Said It Was A Joke. And It Was A Joke. I Have Not Managed To Get Another One But Perhaps Have Not Been In The Best Condition To Try.

I Was Amazed As People Must Be Who Are Seized And Kidnapped, And Who Realize That In The Strange World Of Their Captors They Have A Value Absolutely Unconnected With Anything They Know About Themselves.

For We Did Makeup. But We Didn't Forgive Each Other. And We Didn't Take Steps. And It Got To Be Too Late And We Saw That Each Of Us Had Invested Too Much In Being In The Right And We Walked Away And It Was A Relief.

The Images, The Language, Of Pornography, And Romance Are Alike; Monotonous And Mechanically Seductive, Quickly Leading To Despair.

You Want In All Cases For The Story To Get Through The Writing.

Because If She Let Go Of Her Grief Even For A Minute It Would Only Hit Her Harder When She Bumped Into It Again.

I Read A Book Called The Art Of Loving. A Lot Of Things Seemed Clear While I Was Reading It But Afterwards I Went Back To Being More Or Less The Same.

In Your Life There Are A Few Places, Or Maybe Only The One Place, Where Something Happened, And Then There Are All The Other Places.

In Dreams You Can Have The Feeling That You've Had This Dream Before, That You Have This Dream Over And Over Again, And You Know That It's Really Nothing That Simple. You Know That There's A Whole Underground System That You Call 'dreams,' Having Nothing Better To Call Them, And That This System Is Not Like Roads Or Tunnels But More Like A Live Body Network, All Coiling And Stretching, Unpredictable But Finally Familiar - Where You Are Now, Where You've Always Been.

In Twenty Years I've Never Had A Day When I Didn't Have To Think About Someone Else's Needs. And This Means The Writing Has To Be Fitted Around It.

Lovers. Not A Soft Word, As People Thought, But Cruel And Tearing.

Anecdotes Don't Make Good Stories. Generally I Dig Down Underneath Them So Far That The Story That Finally Comes Out Is Not What People Thought Their Anecdotes Were About.

His Face Contained For Me All Possibilities Of Fierceness And Sweetness, Pride And Submissiveness, Violence, Self-containment. I Never Saw More In It Than I Had When I Saw It First, Because I Saw Everything Then. The Whole Thing In Him That I Was Going To Love, And Never Catch Or Explain.

She Sits In Her Usual Ample Armchair, With Piles Of Books And Unopened Magazines Around Her. She Sips Cautiously From The Mug Of Weak Herb Tea Which Is Now Her Substitute For Coffee. At One Time She Thought That She Could Not Live Without Coffee, But It Turned Out That It Is Really The Warm Large Mug She Wants In Her Hands, That Is The Aid To Thought Or Whatever It Is She Practices Through The Procession Of Hours, Or Of Days.

It's Not Possible To Advise A Young Writer Because Every Young Writer Is So Different. You Might Say, "read," But A Writer Can Read Too Much And Be Paralyzed. Or, "don't Read, Don't Think, Just Write," And The Result Could Be A Mountain Of Drivel. If You're Going To Be A Writer You'll Probably Take A Lot Of Wrong Turns And Then One Day Just End Up Writing Something You Have To Write, Then Getting It Better And Better Just Because You Want It To Be Better, And Even When You Get Old And Think, "there Must Be Something Else People Do," You Won't Be Able To Quit.

One Stroke Of Lightning Does Not Have To Lead Anywhere, But To The Next Stroke Of Lightning.

I Would Really Hope This Would Make People See The Short Story As An Important Art, Not Just Something You Played Around With Until You Got A Novel.

The Complexity Of Things - The Things Within Things - Just Seems To Be Endless. I Mean Nothing Is Easy, Nothing Is Simple.

Love Removes The World For You, And Just As Surely When It's Going Well As When It's Going Badly.

You Think That Would Have Changed Things? The Answer Is Of Course, And For A While, And Never.

And Did I Not Think Then, What Nonsense It Is To Suppose One Man So Different From Another When All That Life Really Boils Down To Is Getting A Decent Cup Of Coffee And Room To Stretch Out In?

People Who Believe In Miracles Do Not Make Much Fuss When They Actually Encounter One

I Don't Always, Or Even Usually, Read Stories From Beginning To End. I Start Anywhere And Proceed In Either Direction. A Story Is Not Like A Road To Follow, It's More Like A House. You Go Inside And Stay There For A While.

Life Would Be Grand If It Weren't For The People.

I Would Have A Flick Of Fear, As In A Dream When You Find Yourself In The Wrong Building Or Have Forgotten The Time For The Exam And Understand That This Is Only The Tip Of Some Shadowy Cataclysm Or Lifelong Mistake.

Finding Yourself

My Head Was A Magpie's Nest Lined With Such Bright Scraps Of Information.

I Despised Their Antics Because I Took Life Seriously And Had A Much More Lofty And Tender Notion Of Romance. But I Would Have Liked To Get Their Attention Just The Same.

A Story ... Has A Sturdy Sense Of Itself Of Being Built Out Of Its Own Necessity, Not Just To Shelter Or Beguile You.

I Want The Reader To Feel Something Is Astonishing. Not The 'what Happens,' But The Way Everything Happens. These Long Short Story Fictions Do That Best, For Me.

Everything Happens For A Reason

Sometimes I Get The Start Of A Story From A Memory, An Anecdote, But That Gets Lost And Is Usually Unrecognizable In The Final Story.

I Sit Watching The Brown Oceanic Waves Of Dry Country Rising Into The Foothills And I Weep Monotonously, Seasickly. Life Is Not Like The Dim Ironic Stories I Like To Read, It Is Like A Daytime Serial On Television. The Banality Will Make You Weep As Much As Anything Else.

The Conversation Of Kisses. Subtle, Engrossing, Fearless, Transforming.

She Could Not Explain Or Quite Understand That It Wasn't Altogether Jealousy She Felt, It Was Rage. And Not Because She Couldn't Shop Like That Or Dress Like That. It Was Because That Was What Girls Were Supposed To Be Like. That Was What Men - People, Everybody - Thought They Should Be Like. Beautiful, Treasured, Spoiled, Selfish, Pea-brained. That Was What A Girl Should Be, To Be Fallen In Love With. Then She Would Become A Mother And She'd Be All Mushily Devoted To Her Babies. Not Selfish Anymore, But Just As Pea-brained. Forever.

Why Is It A Surprise To Find That People Other Than Ourselves Are Able To Tell Lies?

I Want My Stories To Be Something About Life That Causes People To Say, Not, Oh, Isn't That The Truth, But To Feel Some Kind Of Reward From The Writing, And That Doesn't Mean That It Has To Be A Happy Ending Or Anything, But Just That Everything The Story Tells Moves The Reader In Such A Way That You Feel You Are A Different Person When You Finish.

The Deep, Personal Material Of The Latter Half Of Your Life Is Your Children. You Can Write About Your Parents When They're Gone, But Your Children Are Still Going To Be Here, And You're Going To Want Them To Come And Visit You In The Nursing Home.

She Would Live Now, Not Read.

Never Underestimate The Meanness In People's Souls... Even When They're Being Kind... Especially When They're Being Kind.

What She Felt Was A Lighthearted Sort Of Compassion, Almost Like Laughter. A Swish Of Tender Hilarity, Getting The Better Of All Her Sores And Hollows, For The Time Given.

I Saw How The Forms Of Love Might Be Maintained With A Condemned Person But With The Love In Fact Measured And Disciplined, Because You Have To Survive. It Could Be Done So Discreetly That The Object Of Such Care Would Not Suspect, Any More Than She Would Suspect The Sentence Of Death Itself.

There's A Kind Of Tension That If I'm Getting A Story Right I Can Feel Right Away, And I Don't Feel That When I Try To Write A Novel. I Kind Of Want A Moment That's Explosive, And I Want Everything Gathered Into That.

We Say Of Some Things That They Can't Be Forgiven, Or That We Will Never Forgive Ourselves. But We Do-we Do It All The Time.

He Was Evidently The Sort Of Person Who Posed Questions That Were Traps For You To Fall Into.

Moments Of Kindness And Reconciliation Are Worth Having, Even If The Parting Has To Come Sooner Or Later.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Gently Down The Stream. Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Life Is But A Dream.

As A Matter Of Fact She Does Not Know To This Day If Those Words Were Spoken, Or If He Only Caught Her, Wound His Arms Around Her, Held Her So Tightly, With Such Continual, Changing Pressures That It Seemed More Than Two Arms Were Needed, That She Was Surrounded By Him, His Body Strong And Light, Demanding And Renouncing All At Once, As If He Was Telling Her She Was Wrong To Give Up On Him, Everything Was Possible, But Then Again That She Was Not Wrong, He Meant To Stam Himself On Her And Go.

For Years And Years I Thought That Stories Were Just Practice, Till I Got Time To Write A Novel.

Peoples Lives, In Jubilee As Elsewhere, Were Dull, Simple, Amazing, Unfathomable-deep Caves Paved With Kitchen Linoleum. . . . What I Wanted [to Write Down] Was Every Last Thing, Every Layer Of Speech And Thought, Stroke Of Light On Bark Or Walls, Every Smell, Pothole, Pain, Crack, Delusion, Held Still And Held Together-radiant, Everlasting.

Pots Can Show Malice, The Patterns Of Linoleum Can Leer Up At You, Treachery Is The Other Side Of Dailiness.

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