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 is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. Alice Munro
About This Quote

This quotation is about the importance of reading, stories, and how reading can change the life of a person. Reading can be used to build relationships or to create imagination.

Source: Selected Stories

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More Quotes By Alice Munro
  1. It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.

  2. She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...

  3. 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...

  4. I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

  5. I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page...

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