Best Quotes by Carol Shields (Top 10)
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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
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Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.
Carol Shields
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This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.
Carol Shields
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There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
Carol Shields
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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
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Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.
Carol Shields
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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
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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
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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
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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
More Carol Shields Quotes
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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
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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
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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
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Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .
Carol Shields
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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
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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
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A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.
Carol Shields
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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