You know that there's a whole underground system that you call "dreams," having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar—where you are now, where you've always been.

About Alice Munro

Alice Ann Munro ( mən-ROH; née Laidlaw; 10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024) was a Canadian short story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short story cycles.

More quotations from Alice Munro

Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.

—Alice Munro

There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it.

—Alice Munro

love limits misery cleanliness

More quotations tagged with “body”

In forming a bridge between body and mind, dreams may be used as a springboard from which man can leap to new realms of experience lying outside his normal state of consciousness and enlarge his vision not only of himself, but also of the universe in which he lives.

—Ann Faraday

mind vision experience dreams universe body consciousness

To strengthen the mind you must harden the muscles.

—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

mind strength body muscles

I had to face the facts; I was pear-shaped. I was a bit depressed because I hate pears. Especially their shape.

—Charlotte Bingham

self-image hatred body fitness shape

The body has its own way of knowing, a knowing that has little to do with logic, and much to do with truth; little to do with control, and much to do with acceptance; little to do with division and analysis, and much to do with union.

—Marilyn Sewell

truth acceptance knowledge logic analysis body control union

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have, it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

—D. H. Lawrence

life living soul body

History

23 Nov 2014 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

You know that there's a whole underground system that you call "dreams," having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar — where you are now, where you've always been.