I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the nature of belief and the transition from childhood innocence to skepticism.
Alice Munro's quote explores the concept of belief in memories and the inevitability of growing up, where one transitions from accepting the fantastical to confronting reality. It suggests that as we age, we often lose our childlike faith in things that are no longer tangible or credible, highlighting a profound moment of self-realization and internal conflict.
In practice
In discussions about childhood memories, this quote could illustrate the transition from innocence to understanding.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
People just overshoot trying to find God. They're going outside and trying everything. They don't realize that it's right inside themselves.
I got a label because I was Hispanic and a woman and [therefore] I had to be liberal.
Faith is never identical with piety.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!
Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price?
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