Carol Shields Quotes

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

  Carol Shields

  Novel, Monologues, My Own

  50 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Book, Writing, Want

  39 Copy quote

• 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.

  Carol Shields

  Letting Go, Blessing, Long Walks

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Moving, Book, Reading

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Powerful, Fall

  17 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Chapters, Self Discovery

  Carol Shields (2008). “The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.82, Penguin

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Use, Language

  9 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Hard Work, Persons, Hard

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Adventure, Men, Weight

  5 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Light, Childhood, Certain

  10 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Moving, Voice, Scolding

  Carol Shields (2008). “The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.8, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Light, Movement, Said

  Carol Shields (2008). “The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.13, Penguin

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Heart, Love Is, Nurse

  Carol Shields (2008). “The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.7, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Memories, Childhood, Fiction

  Carol Shields (2008). “The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.109, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Learning, Records, Forget

  Carol Shields (2008). “The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.111, Penguin

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Moving, Glasses, Different

  "Unless". Book by Carol Shields, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2002.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Fear, Future, Dare

  Carol Shields (2008). “The Stone Diaries: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.25, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Long, People

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Hands, Knowing, Want

  Carol Shields (2001). “Dressing Up for the Carnival”, p.22, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Life, Stories, Life Is

  8 Copy quote

• And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it.. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life - she knows this for a fact and has always know it - but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternative versions.

  Carol Shields

  Stars, Thinking, Anxiety

  12 Copy quote

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

  Carol Shields

  Pairs, Trunks, Buried

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Loneliness, Weather, Rehearsal

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Sleep, Breathing, Knowing

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Thinking, Discovery

  7 Copy quote

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