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Too Much Happiness: Stories QUOTES

Too Much Happiness: Stories QUOTES

1 " It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

2 " I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people--people like me--who didn't concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

3 " Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

4 " It was comparable to getting sick from bad ventilation "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

5 " Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

6 " Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

7 " In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

8 " 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. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

9 " She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

10 " My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

11 " You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

12 " She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. 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. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

13 " Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

14 " One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

15 " None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

16 " It seems so ridiculous to me,' he said, 'that a person should be expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean like the suit of clothes of an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grows over it, over the clothes, I mean, and that person can't ever get them off. When we are given a chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself may seem overblown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pridefulness... "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

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

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

18 " 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. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

19 " The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books—even those who were hung-over, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending—should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories

20 " 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. "

― Alice Munro , Too Much Happiness: Stories