Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: 13 Stories

by Alice Munro

And I thought, all these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, then you’ll find yourself, in life.

Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts.

Once a friend of mine—a woman, of course—said to me that since pain was only possible if you looked backward to the past or forward to the future she had eliminated the whole problem by living every moment by itself; every moment, she said, was filled with absolute silence.

If we had ever known then what would happen now!” “Nobody knows. What would be the use of it?” my grandmother said.