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.
Alice MunroRead
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?
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the fragility of human connections and the desire for deeper meaning in our lives.
Alice Munro's quote explores the complexity of relationships and the anxiety that comes with feeling disconnected from others. It suggests that in moments of uncertainty, we often yearn for a purpose or destiny to guide us, instead of the seemingly random choices life presents. The imagery evokes a sense of fragility in our connections and highlights a desire for something more substantial than our everyday interactions.
Themes
ConnectionRelationshipsDestinyChoicesMeaning
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on the importance of friendships, one might use this quote to emphasize the need for deeper connections.
More from Alice Munro
All quotes →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.
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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.
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You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
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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.
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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.
Alice MunroRead
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