Alice Munro Quotes

I should have done more. I did too little of everything.

I was not really as good as I should have been.

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

I was the kid who never won the races. I never jumped the highest. I wasn't on the list of the high-achieving.

I never played in a World Cup. I wasn't good enough.

I should be a success and I'm not and other people- younger people- are. Younger people than me are on TV and getting their lives in order. I'm still a nobody. When am I going to not be a nobody?

What really does work to increase the feeling of having a home and its comforts is housekeeping. Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good place to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home. Whether you live alone or with a spouse, parents, and ten children, it is your housekeeping that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms, the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else.

There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.

Most of the stuff I do is garbage.

What is bad? -Everything that arises from weakness.

The worst experience any majority can have is that you convene and you look around and nothing's ready to go.

You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.

I don't like to be second in anything. I was trying, I just wasn't going anywhere.

I have dreamed much and have done very little.

I'm a perfectly equipped failure.

We lost, and that's the main thing that went wrong.

Every man is in some sort a failure to himself. No one ever reaches the heights to which he aspires.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

Perfection is an impossible destination

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

But there are times when patience proves at fault.

I hate clutter. I can't stand it.

How my achievements mock me!

We cuss them because we're not good enough for them. We hate them because they wouldn't look at us, couldn't be bothered to give us an interview. I guess there's a Trent & Brent in every city, in every field. I didn't make it and I don't belong, so I'll just go through life hating them.

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.