"He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want? It was too polite, I said."

"What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee."

"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." [A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]"

"All these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center."

"A million dollars in those days was a million dollars."

"I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me."

"Poverty in girls is not attractive unless combined with sweet sluttishness, stupidity."

"Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft -- a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her."

"There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters."

"There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don't love anyone; it is quite hopeless"."

"Men love women, women love children; children love hamsters– it's quite hopeless."

"Adolescence is usually typified by an unanswerable combination of innocence and insolence."

"The snag in being married to a person who knows more or less everything is that one gets hopelessly lazy. ... I never look things up in books because all I need to do is ask him, and when he gives me the answers I don't properly commit them to memory because I know if I forget all I have to do is to ask him again. It is rather like keeping one's brain in a suitcase."

". . to cook well and with imagination you have to be in a cheerful and contented frame of mind, and thus inclined to be generous."

"I have never had much trouble simultaneously entertaining diametrically opposed propositions, and welcome the possibility that this is not because I have one mind and am out of it, but because I have lots of them, all beavering away on their own."

"I like money. That is, it is my preferred means of completing pecuniary transactions. I'm not particularly keen on handing over wads of currency of the realm, but at least one knows where one is, whereas the chequebook is a snare and a delusion, containing misleading numbers of blank cheques when none of the money that the bank contains is rightfully one's own. ... I think banks owe their customers a lot by way of compensation for the aggravation they cause them."

"Evil and laughter cannot co-exist."

"Well, I think adultery is a filthy habit,' said Rose, 'like using someone else's toothbrush."

"There is no relationship. Women, like men, women, children, babies hamsters. This is the Google Translate of the quote in Persian, above."

"This perhaps is what is meant by hiraeth: a lifelong yearning for what is gona and out of reach."

"When a person implores you to be reasonable what he means is that you should speed round forthwith to his point of view."

"Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification."

"Claudia's the sort of girl who goes through life holding onto the sides."

"If you are through with dreams, then progress halts."

"I don't want to be a leader. I want to be one who goes around with a little oil can and offer help when I see a breakdown."

"Once you are in the orbit of your destiny, weightlessness is the only result."

"Happiness is a continuous creative activity."

"Joy is more infectious than leprosy."

"Happiness dies when not shared"

"I took up leprosy work. Not to help anyone, but to overcome that fear in my life. That it worked out good for others was a by-product. But the fact is: I did it to overcome fear."

"Happiness is a continuous creative activity of imaginatively comparing your experiences to things that aren't as good and thereby feeling happy and grateful."

"Happiness is a continuous creative activity of imaginatively comparing your experiences to things that aren't as good and thereby feeling happy and grateful."

"I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see, I sought my god, but my god eluded me; And then I sought my sisters and my brothers, and in them I found all three."

"Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men."

"What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life."

"No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots."

"The Civil Rights Movement, it wasn't just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands - millions, I should say - of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their community."

"Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene."

"The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks."

"I'm an obsessive. When I get a problem, a question in my mind, it can take me over."

"I would never call myself a cancer survivor because I think it devalues those who do not survive. There's this whole mythology that people bravely battle their cancer and then they become survivors. Well, the ones who don't survive may be just as brave, you know, just as courageous, wonderful people."

"I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them. If I am really ambitious, I pack books into boxes and donate them to prisons."

"Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent."

"Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable."

"Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a pink teddy bear under my arm."

"America is addicted to wars of distraction."

"We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather."

"We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist."

"Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous."

"Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America."