Family Furnishings Quotes

“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. It could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“There ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for--but never did get to see.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“for since Munro’s chosen form is the short story, her overriding theme is brevity—look now, act now, contemplate now, because soon, very soon, this thing that involves you will be over.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was the thing most adults seemed to have.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“this is not a story, only life.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn’t just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“You remember your history?” He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, “Not altogether.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“A hero worn out by his struggle, one who had sacrificed his youth—that was how he might present himself, not without effect. And it was true, in a way. He was physically brave, he had ideals, he was born a peasant and knew what it was to be despised. And she too, just now, had been despising him.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“Her father was outraged. “Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“Alas he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind,” her friend Marie Mendelson has told her. “When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“Quienes recibían las visitas iban en sillas de ruedas, cojeaban apoyados en un bastón o caminaban con rigidez, sin ayuda, a la cabeza de la procesión, orgullosos del logro pero con la mirada perdida o babeando irremisiblemente por el esfuerzo.”
― Alice Munro, Todo queda en casa: Cuentos escogidos

“un campo que parecía sujeto por olas de hielo de borde azulado.”
― Alice Munro, Todo queda en casa: Cuentos escogidos

“verdad, joven, si usted no lo sabe, no debería tener un trabajo de tanta responsabilidad.”
― Alice Munro, Todo queda en casa: Cuentos escogidos

“Grown-up women do the same sort of thing that Charlene and I did. Not counting the moles on eachother’s backs and comparing toe lengths, maybe. But when they meet and feel a particular sympathywith each other they also feel a need to set out the important information, the big events whetherpublic or secret, and then go ahead to fill in all the blanks between. If they feel this warmth andeagerness it is quite impossible for them to bore each other. They will laugh at the very triviality and silliness of what they’re telling, or at the revelation of some appalling selfishness, deception,meanness, sheer badness.There has to be great trust, of course, but that trust can be established at once, in an instant.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“This is his burden- it never occurs to him to call it love.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida ... but of the work I wanted to do ... The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation ... this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“What wouldn't be worth it? To see her a stranger that he couldn't believe he'd ever been married to, or to see that she could never be a stranger yet was unaccountable removed?”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

“This is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get. It isn’t his fault. He’s still an innocent or a savage who doesn’t know there’s a pain so durable in the world. Say to yourself, you lose them anyway. They grow up. For a mother there’s always waiting this private slightly ridiculous desolation. They’ll forget this time, in one way or another they’ll disown you. Or hang around till you don’t know what to do about them, the way Brian has.

And still, what pain. To carry along and get used to until it’s only the past she’s grieving for and nor any possible present.”
― Alice Munro, Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014