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.

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

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.

—Alice Munro

dreams body systems network

More quotations tagged with “misery”

I can see from your utter misery, from your eagerness to misunderstand each other, and from your thoroughly bad temper that this is the real thing.

—Peter Ustinov

misery eagerness temper

Even for our enemies in misery, there should be tears in our eyes.

—Charan Singh

enemies suffering misery tears

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

—George Bernard Shaw

happiness misery irony

Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too.

—Lemony Snicket in The Blank Book

people sadness misery

Despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.

—Tom Robbins

despair sadness sex misery unhappiness masturbation

History

2 Dec 2014 Added