Carol Shields Quotes

Routine is liberating, it makes you feel in control.

He [Tom Avery] is acutely, palpably afraid of Friday nights, what to do with them, those gaping, sneering, and stubbornly recurring widths of time - how to accommodate them, fill them, use them, annihilate them. He'd do anything to sidestep a Friday night. Friday nights demand conviviality and expenditure. It's the time to let loose (yeah, sure).

Men, it seemed to me in those days, were uniquely honored by the stories that erupted in their lives, whereas women were more likely to be smothered by theirs.

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

The expression terminal, when the doctor first pronounced it, had struck Meershank with a comic bounce, this after a lifetime of pursuing puns for a living. His scavenger self immediately pictured a ghostly airline terminal in which scurrying men and women trotted briskly to and fro in hospital gowns.

The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course.

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.

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

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.

How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.

His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.

It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidence - the way in which there is no single truth about anyone's life, but as many truths as there are observers.

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

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.

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.

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.

The men, her husband and sons, leave for the quarry at seven o'clock sharp and return at five. What do they imagine she does all day? It makes her shiver to think of it, how not one pair of eyes can see through the roof and walls of her house and regard her as she moves through her dreamlike days, bargaining from minute to minute with indolence, that tempter.

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.

This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup.

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

She has confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that as burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says to see men and women - though, oddly, they mostly women - tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university's records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. all they want is for their to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection.

It's like concentrating on your own breath: once you start thinking about the air rushing in and out of your body, your breath has a way of getting stuck in your throat so that you understand how easy it would be to fall down and die.

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.

His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures

Either we're all ordinary, or else none of us is ordinary.

I like to chant a couple of lines of poetry into the ozone layer every day or so, another caller says.

Time and chance. The twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates.

He wondered exactly how lost a person could get. Lost at sea, lost in the woods. Fatally lost.

For some, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world

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

To be a romantic is to believe anything can happen to us.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment ...

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.

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.

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

From surfeit to loss is a short line.

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?

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.

Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage.

A glance can both submit and subvert; it can be sharp or shy, scornful or adoring; it can be a near cousin to scrutiny – but it almost always assumes a degree of mutually encoded knowledge. A spark is struck and apprehended; the head turns on it's spinal axis; the shoulders freeze; the eyes are the only busy part of the body, simultaneously receiving and sending out information, so that a glance becomes more than a glance. It is a weapon, a command, or a sigh of acquiescence.

He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside his body, someone stronger too, cut loose from the common bonds of sex, of responsibility. Looking back he would remember a brief moment when time felt mute and motionless. This hour of solitary wandering seemed a gift, and part of the gift was an old greedy grammar flapping in his ears: lost, more lost, utterly lost. He felt the fourteen days of his marriage collapsing backward and becoming an invented artifact, a curved space he must learn to fit into. Love was not protected. No, it wasn't. It sat out in the open like anything else.

Safety was one thing, but what he really wanted was to be electrified, to be wounded, to be cast into the wilderness, to be released, to be exalted, and most especially to be surrounded by the drowning noise and ebullience and casual presence of friends calling out his name, demanding his presence.

I remember that I did feel, starting my mini-tour, the resident anxiety you develop when you know you've been too lucky; at any moment, maybe next Tuesday afternoon, I would be stricken with something unbearable.

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

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

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

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.

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

Curiously, she is not afraid, knowing as she does that love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and furthermore, she is accustomed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner.

These hips are mighty hips.
These hips are magic hips.
I have known them
to put a spell on a man
and spin him like a top

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

Nothing matters except for the harvest, the gathering in, the adding up, the bringing together, the whole story, the way it happens and happens and goes on happening.
(from "Collision")

It is miracle enough to find that love lies in his grasp, that it can be spoken aloud, that he, so diffident, so slow, so thwarted by the poverty of his own beginnings, is able to put into words the fevers of his heart and at the same time offer up the endearments a woman needs to hear. The knowledge shocked him at first, how language flowed straight out of him like a river in flood, but once the words burst from his throat it was as though he had found his true tongue. He cannot imagine, thinking back, why he had believed himself incapable of passionate expression.

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 ...

Love is not, anywhere, taken seriously. It's not respected. It's the one thing in the world everyone wants, but for some reason people are obliged to pretend that love is trifling and foolish.

Dorrie gave Larry's hand an excited, distracted squeeze that said: almost home. They were about to be matter-of-factly claimed by familiar streets and houses and the life they'd chosen or which had chosen them.

I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I'm not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)

I am not at peace.' Daisy Goodwill's final (unspoken) words.