Unless Carol Shields Quotes & Sayings

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people. — Carol Shields

This whole business of all these lenses is ridiculous. You know, it's like you have to capture your picture. You have to create it. You have to see it. You have to seize it and you have to move in to get it, so those lenses are just an escape of some sort or a shield. — Carol Friedman

She's always busy, too busy, and is always reminding herself of this fact, so that the notion of an empty apartment, even an empty bed, holds no more than faint flush of alarm. And only when she thinks about it ... She'll manage, though. She knows she will. — Carol Shields

Routine is liberating, it makes you feel in control. — Carol Shields

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

He had been relfecting, while staring at the fringed blue petals, about love, about the long steady way his imperfect parents managed to love each other, and about his own deficient love for Dorrie, how it came and went, how he kept finding it and losing it again.
And now, here in this garden maze, getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point, that and the moment of willed abandonment, the unexpected rapture of being blindly led. — Carol Shields

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

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

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

Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage. — Carol Shields

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

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue. — Carol Shields

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

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

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. — Carol Shields

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

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud. — Carol Shields

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment ... — Carol Shields

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

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. — Carol Shields

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. — Carol Shields

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. — Carol Shields

I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world. — Carol Shields

She herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know. — Carol Shields

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

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. — Carol Shields

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

I've had lots of happy moments. I've been lucky. But I always think the happiest moment hasn't happened yet. I'm talking about the queen of happy moments. The biggie. The unfathomable. The epitome of happiness. The only thing is, I worry that when it comes along I won't recognize it. It'll be flashing away there at the edge of my vision and I'll be looking so hard that I'll just let it float right by. — Carol Shields

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. — Carol Shields

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. — Carol Shields