Quotes from Carol Shields

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage.

Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness—it's too good, you see, too stupidly good.

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

Time. And chance. Those twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates.

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.

Cuando llegue el momento de mi lobotomía, ése es uno de los incidentes sociales que me propongo eliminar.

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.

Whenever I meet anyone new, I don't say, Tell me about your belief system. I say, Tell me about your average day.

I'm always interested in how characters change and how they often act inconsistently. When people teach creative writing courses, one of the first things they teach is to keep your characters consistent. And this is bad advice because human beings are not consistent. The very moments that we're interested in are those moments in which they act inconsistently, out of character. They suddenly leap up. They can become larger than they really are. I'm interested in those moments.

It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation.

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.

People who work in libraries, like those in bakeshops, ought to be made peaceful and happy by their surroundings, but they almost never are.

From surfeit to loss is a short line.

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.

Learning to skip has brought control into her life. Whenever she feels at all sad she switches into this wholly happy gait, sliding, hopping, and sliding again; when doing this, it seems as though her head separates from her body, making her feel dizzy and emptied out of bad thoughts. Does anyone else in the world know this trick, she wonders. Probably not, though her mother sometimes waves at her from the window, waves and smiles.

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