Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everyt — Alice Munro

"You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations."

"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."

"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."

"The thing is to be happy, he said. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. Its nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldnt believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and youre just there, going along easy in the world."

"I want my stories to move people, I don’t care if they are men or women or children. I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn’t that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn’t mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish."

"This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you dont think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You dont think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. This is what happens. Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."