Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.