Carol Shields quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Carol Shields

Top Carol Shields Quotes

Browse top 43 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Carol Shields.

Favorite Carol Shields Quotes

1. "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." ~ Carol Shields

2. "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")" ~ Carol Shields

3. "He was discomfited to see how easily men (and women as well) stepped from the train to station platform, from platform to train – with ease, with levity, laughing and talking and greeting each other as though oblivious to the abrupt geographical shifts they were making, and disrespectful of the distance and differences they entered. Many were hatless, their clothes brightly colored. The cases they carried appeared, from the way they handled them, to be feather-light." ~ Carol Shields

4. "Cuando llegue el momento de mi lobotomía, ése es uno de los incidentes sociales que me propongo eliminar." ~ Carol Shields

5. "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." ~ Carol Shields

6. "To be a romantic is to believe anything can happen to us." ~ Carol Shields

7. "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

8. "There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud." ~ Carol Shields

9. "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." ~ Carol Shields

10. "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

11. "But it was comfort I couldn't afford. At the risk of my life I had to go on as I was, to confess fear to anyone at all would have been to surrender the tough new self that had begun to grow inside of me, the self I had created and now couldn't do without." ~ Carol Shields

12. "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

13. "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

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

15. "nothing she didor saidwas quitewhat she meantbut still her lifecould be called a monumentshaped in a slantof available lightand set to the movementof possible music" ~ Carol Shields

16. "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

17. "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

18. "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

19. "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

20. "...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

21. "Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction." ~ Carol Shields

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

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

24. "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." ~ Carol Shields

25. "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

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

27. "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

28. "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." ~ Carol Shields

29. "Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies – birth, love, and death – are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!" ~ Carol Shields

30. "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. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say „Twelve years passed" is to deny the fact of biographical logic. 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." ~ Carol Shields

31. "I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending--these eat up a woman's creativity, anyone's creativity. But I've been watching the ways she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even with it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom." ~ Carol Shields

32. "His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures" ~ Carol Shields

33. "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

34. "Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground." ~ Carol Shields

35. "A woman says: "I plan to cut the shoulder pads out of all my blouses and dresses and load them on a barge and dump them in Lake Winnipeg, creating a tidal wave which I'm told can be harnessed to provide electric power to the entire region." ~ Carol Shields

36. "Routine is liberating, it makes you feel in control." ~ Carol Shields

37. "Boiled down, isn't love just a form of vanity? You know, the wish to be adored. To be the absolute center for someone else." ~ Carol Shields

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

39. "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." ~ Carol Shields

40. "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

41. "Dar a obosit sa mai fie trista ?i a obosit sa nu-i mai pese ca e trista, sa nu mai ?tie macar ca e trista, într-un fel. ?i în capul ei ca o cutie mica ?i osoasa în?elege ?i accepta faptul ca imensa ei nefericire e sortita sa ramâna lipsita de însemnatate. Deja, chiar în clipa asta, sunt încredin?ata ca o parte din ea vrea sa se întoarca la lucrurile care îi placeau, sa simta cum o noua periu?a de din?i îi atinge gingiile, de exemplu. Un lucru marunt ca asta. Ar vrea sa-?i lege din nou la brâu un ?or? curat ?i apretat, sa cure?e jumatate de kilogram de cartofi în trei minute ?i sa îi puna la înmuiat în apa rece. Sa lustruiasca un borcan de jeleu ?i sa-l puna pe raftul de sus, lânga tovara?ii lui. Sa linga cu limba un plic, sa-i lipeasca un timbru într-un colt, sa-l puna la cutia cu scrisori. Ar vrea sa î?i cure?e trupul cu o rafala de râsete ?i sa cedeze for?ei gravita?ionale. Se va întâmpla. Toata suferin?a va fi data la o parte. Din clipa în clipa" ~ Carol Shields

42. "He wondered exactly how lost a person could get. Lost at sea, lost in the woods. Fatally lost." ~ Carol Shields

43. "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)." ~ Carol Shields

Carol Shields Quotes Pictures

Carol Shields Quotes

Carol Shields Quotes

Carol Shields Quotes

<< Ray Park Quotes

Bruce Dern Quotes >>

Today's Quote

Why the hell do you love me so much? Seriously, I am fucked up and nuts," I said into his chest, still wet from the bath. I could feel him chuckling. "You think I don't know you're nuts? I've known that all along. Don't fool yourself. And like I've been telling you, I like nuts girls," he said, kissing the top of my head. "Well, you sure can pick ‘em if that's what you're in to."
Author: Alice Clayton

What Did Carol Shields Talk About?

Famous Authors

Jonathan Coe Quotes (39 sayings)
Stefan Banach Quotes (1 sayings)
Kirstin Cronn Mills Quotes (6 sayings)
Guy Picciotto Quotes (2 sayings)
Kate Braverman Quotes (20 sayings)
Donald Johanson Quotes (15 sayings)
Peter Stone Quotes (4 sayings)
William Wirt Quotes (1 sayings)
Claude Shannon Quotes (3 sayings)
Brad Paisley Quotes (19 sayings)

Popular Topics