Carol Shields Quotes

18 quotes in 300 categories

• There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
• 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…
• This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.
• Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.
• 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.
• Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.
• 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…
• 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.
• Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.
• 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…
• It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.
• Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.
• 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…
• I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.

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