Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
Interpretation
The quote warns against overlooking the potential for hidden negativity in people, even when they appear kind.
Alice Munro's quote emphasizes the complexity of human nature, suggesting that kindness can sometimes mask deeper, unkind intentions. It serves as a reminder to remain vigilant and not to take people at face value, as their true motivations may be hidden beneath a veneer of benevolence.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the complexities of human behavior in a psychology class.
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.
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.
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.
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
When you're Black in America, you spend a lot of time counting firsts. The higher the first, the more we marvel (and shake our heads at how long it took to happen.) The higher the first, the more the person who achieved it comes to represent how we want the nation to see us.
The more two people open to each other, the more this wide-openness also brings to the surface all the obstacles to it: their deepest, darkest wounds, their desperation and mistrust, and their rawest emotional trigger points. Just as the sun's warmth causes clouds to arise by prompting the earth to release its moisture, so love's pure openness activates the thick clouds of our emotional wounding, the tight places where we are shut down, where we live in fear and resist love.
True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.
Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.
I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.
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