Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
Interpretation
The quote warns against overlooking the potential for hidden negativity in people, even when they appear kind.
Alice Munro's quote emphasizes the complexity of human nature, suggesting that kindness can sometimes mask deeper, unkind intentions. It serves as a reminder to remain vigilant and not to take people at face value, as their true motivations may be hidden beneath a veneer of benevolence.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the complexities of human behavior in a psychology class.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
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.
Sir,"she said,"you are no gentleman!" An apt observation,"he answered airily."And, you, Miss, are no lady.
By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it.
There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.
You are β truly your fatherβs son, Harry. . . .
Try honest to see things from the other person's point of view.
As soon as love became the driving force behind marriage, people began to demand the right to remain single if they had not found love or to divorce if they fell out of love.
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