Lives of Girls and Women Quotes

“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.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“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.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“To be made of flesh was humiliation.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“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.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“((لكني آمل أن تستخدمي عقلك. استخدمي عقلك، لا تتشتتي، فبمجرد أن ترتكبي ذلك الخطأ – أن تتشتتي بسبب رجل – لن تعود حياتك ملكك، ستكونين أنت من يتحمل العناء، المرأة دائمًا هي من تتحمل العناء.))”
― أليس مونرو , Lives of Girls and Women

“One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long, brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“He said the difference between the male and female modes of thought were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and girl, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, "I must wash my hair." When I read this I was frantically upset; I had to put the magazine down. It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as a girl thought; the full moon would never as long as I lived remind me to wash my hair. I knew if I showed it to my mother she would say, "Oh it is just that maddening male nonsense, women have no brains." That would not convince me; surely a New York psychiatrist must know. And women like my mother were in the minority, I could see that. Moreover I did not want to be like my mother, with her virginal brusqueness, her innocence. I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice where there couldn't be a choice.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It's true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.”
― Alice Munro , Lives of Girls and Women

“But I hope you will -- use your brains. Use your brains. Don't be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being -- distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“... I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn’t want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“Love is not for the undepilated.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“As I walked into Jubilee I repossessed the world. Trees, houses, fences, streets, cambe back to me, in their own sober and familiar shapes. Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self--my old devious, ironic, isolated self--beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women.
Yes, but it is up to us to make it come.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“hector him like this from now on, when I could get him alone.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“I dreamed a nineteenth-century sort of life, walks and studying, rectitude, courtesy, maidenhood, peacefulness.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“He hated people using big words, talking about things outside of their own lives. He hated people trying to tie things together. Since these had been great pastimes of mine, why did he not hate me? Perhaps I successfully hid from him what I was like. More likely, he rearranged me, took just what he needed, to suit himself.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“She was a woman I would recognize now as a likely sufferer from varicose veins, hemorrhoids, a dropped womb, cysted ovaries, inflammations, discharges, lumps and stones in various places, one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life, with stories to tell.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“Su voz daba a entender que era posible hacer cualquier cosa, cualquiera, y quitarle importancia diciendo que era una broma, una broma a costa de toda la gente solemne y culpable, toda la gente moral y emotiva del mundo, la gente que «se tomaba a sí misma en serio». Eso era lo que él no podía soportar de los demás.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“Well, first off, what is a person? A large percent water. Just plain water. Nothing in a person is that remarkable. Carbon. The simplest elements. What is it they say? Ninety-eight cents’ worth? That’s all. It’s the way it’s put together that’s remarkable. The way it’s put together, we have the heart and the lungs. We have the liver. Pancreas. Stomach. Brain. All these things, what are they? Combinations of elements! Combine them—combine the combinations—and you’ve got a person! We call it Uncle Craig, or your father, or me. But it’s just these combinations, these parts put together and running in a certain particular way, for the time being. Then what happens is that one of the parts gives out, breaks down. In Uncle Craig’s case, the heart. So we say, Uncle Craig is dead. The person is dead. But that’s just our way of looking at it. That’s just our human way. If we weren’t thinking all the time in terms of persons, if we were thinking of Nature, all Nature going on and on, parts of it dying—well not dying, changing, changing is the word I want, changing into something else, all those elements that made the person changing and going back into Nature again and reappearing over and over in birds and animals and flowers—Uncle Craig doesn’t have to be Uncle Craig! Uncle Craig is flowers!”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women