Carol Shields > Quotes

“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, The Republic of Love

“Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.”
― Carol Shields

“This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.”
― Carol Shields, Unless

“There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“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

“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, Unless

“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, The Stone Diaries

“In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“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, Unless

“It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.”
― Carol Shields, The Republic of Love

“It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping: our lives are steamed and shaped into stories. Knowing that is what keeps me from going insane, and though I don't like to admit it, sometimes it's the only thing.”
― Carol Shields, Small Ceremonies

“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, The Stone Diaries

“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, Small Ceremonies

“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, The Stone Diaries

“Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies – birth, love, and death – are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“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, Unless

“A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn't ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“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, The Republic of Love

“When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that our forbears were imbued with a deeper purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind, believing, for example, that early scientists pursued their ends with unbroken „dedication“ and that artists worked in the flame of some perpetual „inspiration“. But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today. The least breeze, whether it be sexual or psychological – or even a real breeze, carrying with it the refreshment of oxygene and energy – has the power to turn us from our path.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“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, The Stone Diaries

“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, The Stone Diaries

“For some, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“What I'd like is a lobotomy, a clean job, the top of my head neatly sawn off and designated contents removed.”
― Carol Shields, Unless

“Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .”
― Carol Shields, Unless

“It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“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, The Stone Diaries

“Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.”
― Carol Shields, The Orange Fish

“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, The Stone Diaries

“His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries