"Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace."

"Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws."

"It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known."

"The truth needs so little rehearsal."

"If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."

"It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell."

"The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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]"

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

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

"It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation"

"They spoke like caricatures, it was unbearable."

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

"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?"

"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?"

"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..."

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