Carol Shields Quotes

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.

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.

Go for long walks, indulge in hot baths, Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, Just let go, Just be.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

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.

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

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

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.

Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.

In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.

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.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.

Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.

Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.

It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.

From surfeit to loss is a short line.

Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage.

Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren't really, they weren't allowed to be.

These hips are mighty hips.These hips are magic hips.I have known themto put a spell on a manand spin him like a top

A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn't ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.