Top 73 Carol Shields Quotes
#1. The recounting of a life is a cheat ... even our own stories are obscenely distorted ...
Carol Shields
#2. Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light ...
Carol Shields
#3. These are frightening times ... when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.
Carol Shields
#4. I was the breakable one. Women always are. It's not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It's more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other. After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you're drowning.
Carol Shields
#5. For some, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world
Carol Shields
#6. Whenever I meet anyone new, I don't say, "Tell me about your belief system." I say, "Tell me about your average day".
Carol Shields
#7. A woman says: I plan to cut the shoulder pads out of all my blouses and dresses and load them on a barge and dump them in Lake Winnipeg, creating a tidal wave which I'm told can be harnessed to provide electric power to the entire region.
Carol Shields
#8. Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.
Carol Shields
#9. Curiously, she is not afraid, knowing as she does that love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and furthermore, she is accustomed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner.
Carol Shields
#10. Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.
Carol Shields
#11. Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, pray, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, just let go, just be.
Carol Shields
#12. It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.
Carol Shields
#13. He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can't comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement.
Carol Shields
#14. How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.
Carol Shields
#15. These hips are mighty hips.
These hips are magic hips.
I have known them
to put a spell on a man
and spin him like a top
Carol Shields
#16. The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.
Carol Shields
#17. I like to chant a couple of lines of poetry into the ozone layer every day or so, another caller says.
Carol Shields
#18. He wondered exactly how lost a person could get. Lost at sea, lost in the woods. Fatally lost.
Carol Shields
#19. We are too kind, too willing
too unwilling too
reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want.
Carol Shields
#20. Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.
Carol Shields
#21. I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world.
Carol Shields
#22. Nothing she did
or said
was quite
what she meant
but still her life
could be called a monument
shaped in a slant
of available light
and set to the movement
of possible music
Carol Shields
#23. She herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.
Carol Shields
#24. His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.
Carol Shields
#25. Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs.
Carol Shields
#26. I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.
Carol Shields
#27. The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course.
Carol Shields
#28. To be a romantic is to believe anything can happen to us.
Carol Shields
#29. Open a book this minute and start reading. Don't move until you've reached page fifty. Until you've buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.
Carol Shields
#30. Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction.
Carol Shields
#31. Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren't really, they weren't allowed to be.
Carol Shields
#32. The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves. We are always damping down our inner weather, permitting ourselves the comforts of postponement, of rehearsals
Carol Shields
#33. I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I'm not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)
Carol Shields
#34. A woman's life isn't worth a plateful of cabbage if she hasn't felt life stir under her heart. Taking a little one to nurse, watching him grow to manhood, that's what love is.
Carol Shields
#35. Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place.
Carol Shields
#37. Nothing matters except for the harvest, the gathering in, the adding up, the bringing together, the whole story, the way it happens and happens and goes on happening.
(from "Collision")
Carol Shields
#38. I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.
Carol Shields
#39. Time and chance. The twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates.
Carol Shields
#40. Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.
Carol Shields
#41. I don't know how to get things started ... It's like there's this great big wheel I've got to start rolling only I don't seem to have the muscles to get it going.
Carol Shields
#42. Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.
Carol Shields
#43. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.
Carol Shields
#44. It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again ...
Carol Shields
#45. I am not at peace.' Daisy Goodwill's final (unspoken) words.
Carol Shields
#46. Dorrie gave Larry's hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they'd chosen or which had chosen them.
Carol Shields
#47. Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness - it's too good, you see, too stupidly good.
Carol Shields
#48. So this is where the years of maturity deliver us - to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else's first and primal other.
Carol Shields
#49. It's like concentrating on your own breath: once you start thinking about the air rushing in and out of your body, your breath has a way of getting stuck in your throat so that you understand how easy it would be to fall down and die.
Carol Shields
#50. This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup.
Carol Shields
#51. His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures
Carol Shields
#52. ... it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves.
Carol Shields
#53. There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.
Carol Shields
#54. Safety was one thing, but what he really wanted was to be electrified, to be wounded, to be cast into the wilderness, to be released, to be exalted, and most especially to be surrounded by the drowning noise and ebullience and casual presence of friends calling out his name, demanding his presence.
Carol Shields
#55. Love is not, anywhere, taken seriously. It's not respected. It's the one thing in the world everyone wants, but for some reason people are obliged to pretend that love is trifling and foolish.
Carol Shields
#56. It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidence - the way in which there is no single truth about anyone's life, but as many truths as there are observers.
Carol Shields
#57. In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.
Carol Shields
#58. Why should men be allowed to strut under the privilege of their life adventures, wearing them like a breast full of medals, while women went all gray and silent beneath the weight of theirs?
Carol Shields
#59. He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.
Carol Shields
#60. She's always busy, too busy, and is always reminding herself of this fact, so that the notion of an empty apartment, even an empty bed, holds no more than faint flush of alarm. And only when she thinks about it ... She'll manage, though. She knows she will.
Carol Shields
#61. A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn't ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.
Carol Shields
#62. This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.
Carol Shields
#64. Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage.
Carol Shields
#65. A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.
Carol Shields
#66. Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.
Carol Shields
#67. Boiled down, isn't love just a form of vanity? You know, the wish to be adored. To be the absolute center for someone else.
Carol Shields
#68. Either we're all ordinary, or else none of us is ordinary.
Carol Shields
#69. It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation.
Carol Shields
#70. What I'd like is a lobotomy, a clean job, the top of my head neatly sawn off and designated contents removed.
Carol Shields
#71. Routine is liberating, it makes you feel in control.
Carol Shields
#72. I remember that I did feel, starting my mini-tour, the resident anxiety you develop when you know you've been too lucky; at any moment, maybe next Tuesday afternoon, I would be stricken with something unbearable.
Carol Shields
#73. Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body's smoothe, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.
Carol Shields
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