Frasi di Alice Munro

“Cercò di metterci una pietra sopra, ma quella si rifiutava di far da coperchio al passato.”

“Era quello il genere di bugia che speravo di non dover mai più dire, il disprezzo che mi auguravo di non dover mai più mostrare, quello per le cose davvero importanti per me. E per evitarlo, dovevo in pratica stare alla larga dalle persone di mia conoscenza.”

“Ormai sapeva che nella vita viene il momento in cui brutto e bello svolgono più o meno la stessa funzione, quando tutto ciò che guardi altro non è che un gancio a cui appendere le sensazioni scomposte del corpo, e i brandelli della mente.”

“L'ineffabile eccitazione che si prova quando un disastro imminente promette di sollevarci da ogni responsabilità collegata alla vita. In quei casi, un senso di pudore costringe a darsi un contegno e a restare immobili.”

“Aveva anche un problema personale con il senatore McCarthy: avvrebbe voluto stare dalla sua parte, ma il fatto che fosse cattolico la bloccava. Chiamava il papa popò. La affascinava il pensiero di quanti cialtroni e canaglie ci fossero al mondo.”

“Ecco Dotty, tirata fuori dal mondo reale ed esposta alla luce, sospesa all'interno della splendida gelatina trasparente che Hugo ha passato la vita a imparare a realizzare. Si tratta di un numero di magia, non c'è altro modo per definirlo; si tratta, potremmo anche dire, di un generoso atto d'amore particolare, libero da ogni sentimentalismo. Di un dono felice e meraviglioso.
(Materiali)”

“L'attimo di felicità che aveva diviso con loro gli restò nei ricordi, ma non seppe mai che farsene. Chissà se quei momenti significano davvero, come sembra, che avremmo a disposizione una vita felice nella quale ci imbattiamo, consapevolmente, solo qualche rara volta? Chissà se gettano su quel che precede e quel che segue, tutto ciò che è accaduto nella nostra vita, o che noi abbiamo fatto accadere, una luce tale da rendere ogni cosa trascurabile?”

“Era arrivato al punto in cui la gratitudine non rappresentava più un peso, ma un sentimento spontaneo, specie quando nessuno la pretendeva.”

“Ora non credo piú che la gente abbia segreti precisi e comunicabili, né sentimenti esuberanti e facili da riconoscere. Non ci credo piú.”

“Una volta ragazze e ragazzi cercavano in ogni modo di apparire donne e uomini fatti, spesso con risultati ridicoli. Ora invece c’erano uomini e donne che cercavano di sembrare ragazzini finché, presumibilmente, un giorno si svegliavano a un passo dalla vecchiaia.
(Marrakesh)”

“In quel momento la nostra dolcezza reciproca era senza nubi, senza strategie, e i nostri conflitti sembravano irreali. Si era aperto un cancello, molto probabilmente, ma noi non lo varcammo.
(La dama spagnola)”

“I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.”

“She would live now, not read.”

“The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you're just there, going along easy in the world.”

“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”

“People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things.”

“Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls… Even when they're being kind… especially when they're being kind.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.”

“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”

“Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.”

“Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?”

“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.”

“He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.”

“Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.”

“Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.”

“People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

“They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.”

“For we did makeup. But we didn't forgive each other. And we didn't take steps. And it got to be too late and we saw that each of us had invested too much in being in the right and we walked away and it was a relief.”

“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.”

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

“What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".”

“Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.”

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

“We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do--we do it all the time.”

“There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.”

“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.”

“Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?”

“And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.”