Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the hidden malice and treachery found in everyday objects and experiences.
Alice Munro's quote suggests that the ordinary aspects of life, such as household items and daily patterns, can harbor deeper meanings of malice and betrayal. It invites the reader to consider how familiarity can sometimes mask darker truths, revealing that the mundane may not always be innocent.
In practice
In a literary discussion about the symbolism of everyday objects.
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.
In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?
Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!
God does not delay to hear our prayers because He has no mind to give; but that, by enlarging our desires, He may give us the more largely.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
Where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand; For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce, Strive here for mast'ry.
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