Quotes from Carol Shields

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.

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

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

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

In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.

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.

A woman's life isn't worth a plateful of cabbage if she hasn't felt life stir under her heart. Taking a little one to nurse, watching him grow to manhood, that's what love is.

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 know we want.

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

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 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.

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

I was the breakable one. Women always are. It's not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It's more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other. After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you're drowning.

Routine is liberating, it makes you feel in control.

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.

It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.

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.

it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves.

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

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.

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

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

He knows very well what underlies the compulsive side of his nature; it is the wish to escape that which he can't comprehend, seeking safety in an unbendable estrangement.