“At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure—even at a time of the month when this could not be true—that I had blood on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass. I could not hit the ball in volleyball; being called upon to perform an action in front of others made all my reflexes come undone. I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together. I hated Science; we perched on stools under harsh lights behind tables of unfamiliar, fragile equipment, and were taught by the principal of the school, a man with a cold, self-relishing voice—he read the Scriptures every morning—and a great talent for inflicting humiliation. I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was no help for it, she had to run out into the hall. Then the boys made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter—oh, mine too—pursued her. There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into the low places. Like that—and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we are sitting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, “Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than this hand has.” And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went. I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able even to imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive—old, old—when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“she started off with an inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran downhill. In the first place she could never find a pattern to suit her. It was no wonder; there were no patterns made to match the ideas that blossomed in her head.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“The deceits which her spinster's sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children's hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“Here they found themselves year after year- a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children's dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance- not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles's living room.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“The red velvet material was hard to work with, it pulled, and the style my mother had chosen was not easy either. She was not really a good sewer. She liked to make things; that is different. Whenever she could she tried to skip basting and pressing and she took no pride in the fine points of tailoring, the finishing of buttonholes and the overcasting of seams as, for instance, my aunt and my grandmother did.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“I went around the house to the back door thinking, I have been to a dance and a boy has walked me home and kissed me. It was all true. My life was possible.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
“Так что будь умницей, Хелен, и живи дальше, как все остальные, и скоро-скоро мы все увидим весну.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Dance of the Happy Shades
Alice Munro
Born place: in Wingham, Ontario, Canada
Born date July 10, 1931
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“Had I only known my letters
Would be of such importance
I’d empty myself on paper
Every single morning’
And it was for such reason,
as she read his little stanza,
that she decided to stamp
one
final
letter:
‘Every single morning
I’d empty myself on paper
You were my greater importance
That’s why I wrote you letters.”
― Mie Hansson, quote from Where Pain Thrives
“My life has been one big audition.”
― Elizabeth Eulberg, quote from Take a Bow
“There's no right and wrong with feelings. There is only what there is.”
― Sarah Pinborough, quote from Behind Her Eyes
“A creature is what it is, even if it can't show its true face.”
― quote from Wake of Vultures
“A butterfly flutters its wings in Malaysia and the changes in air currents cause a hurricane in Florida. I love that idea. That even one tiny action can create an enormous effect.”
― Emma Scott, quote from The Butterfly Project
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