The Love of a Good Woman Quotes

“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.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“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. ”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“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.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“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. ”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“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. ”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was, like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain there unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay,”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman: Stories

“You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said - that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question. ”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman: Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person's mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“You know one reason I know he's not dead?' said Sonje. 'I don't dream about him.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“...sitting in the sand with her back against a log, crying. She smiled at Kath, she said, 'don't think I'm sad'.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“I just think it would be beautiful,' she says. 'I think it would be beautiful if a woman could.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“Captain Tervitt had been a real captain, for many years, on the lake boats. Now he had a job as a special constable. He stopped the cars to let the children cross the street in front of the school and kept them from sledding down the side street in winter. He blew his whistle and held up one big hand, which looked like a clown's hand, in a white glove. He was still tall and straight and broad-shouldered, though old and white-haired. Cars would do what he said, and the children, too.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“Chess worked for a wholesale grocery firm. He had thought of being a history teacher, but his father had persuaded him that teaching was no way to support a wife and get on in the world. His father had helped him get this job but told him that once he got in he was not to expect any favors. He didn’t. He left the house before it was light, during this first winter of our marriage, and came home after dark. He worked hard, not asking that the work he did fit in with any interests he might have had or have any purpose to it that he might have once honored. No purpose except to carry us both toward that life of lawnmowers and freezers which we believed we had no mind for. I might marvel at his submission, if I thought about it. His cheerful, you might say gallant, submission.

But then, I thought, it’s what men do.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“But once in a while came a moment where everything seemed to have something to say to you. The rocking bushes, the bleaching light. All in a flash, in a rush, when you couldn't concentrate (...) so you get the wrong idea, surely the wrong idea. That somebody dead might be alive and in Jakarta.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“Its pattern of blue flowers and leaves had gone silvery. Kath fastened her eyes on these, while they tied Kent up in knots and he didn't even realize it.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“Look down, look down-see how the reeds wave in the water, they are alive but they never break the surface.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“The moon came up through the black trees on top of the rocks, and looked so huge, so solemn and thrilling, that there were cries of amazement. What's that? And even when it had climbed higher in the sky and shrunk to a more normal size people acknowledged it from time to time, saying 'the harvest moon' or 'did you see it when it first came up?”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman