"A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape."

"He could no more describe the feeling he got from her than you can describe a smell. It's like the scorch of electricity. It's like burnt kernels of wheat. No, it's like a bitter orange. I give up."

"There were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away."

"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."

"Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle— And hoping It will reach Japan."

"What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever."

"A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks"

"My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache."

"Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry."

"Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant."

"If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true."

"He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him."

"It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love... the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian."

"You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled."

"The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity."

"In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are the other places, which are just other places."

"She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about."

"He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee."

"Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?"

"She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store..."

"He says the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?"

"Life is always so full. Getting and spending we lay waste to our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do?"

"People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life."

"They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable."

"It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation"

"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."