Quotes from Carol Shields

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

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.

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.

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

the human and the divine are balanced across a dazzling equation: man's creation of God being exactly equal to God's creation of man, one unified mind bending like a snake around the curve of earth and heaven.

A pound of joy weighs more When grief has gone before.

This is the only plot that really interests me, that is this plot which is the arc of the human life. I'm not interested in any other kind of adventure plots or Holy Grail plots or climbing the mountaintop plots. I'm interested in how that arc of aging, growing and then, of course, the shadowy end of life, the illness and eventual death.

Everything Sarah writes is what he needs to hear. Of course he knows this can be explained as a trick of love, that every word spoken by a lover becomes radiantly relevant and overlaid with gold.

At the edge of every experience is the refracted light of recollection, snagged there like an image in a beveled mirror.

It's hard to say whether she's comfortable with her blend of distortion and omission, its willfulness, in fact; but she is accustomed to it. And 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.

A bedjacket speaks of desperation, and what it says is: toodle-oo.

She never checks the weather before she dresses. Her clothes are the weather.

Almost everyone agrees with her. However much they look into her eyes and think she is uttering mere niceties, they are sworn to that ultimate courtesy, which is to believe what people want us to believe. And thus, when Mrs. Willow bids them good afternoon, they courteously rise to their feet. "Good afternoon," they smile back, shaking hands carefully, and postponing their slow, rhythmic applause and the smashing of the teacups.

When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible.

It occurs to me that there are some happenings for which the proper response is not comprehension at all, but amazement and acceptance.

A Canadian journalist named Pinky Fulham was killed when a soft drinks vending machine overturned, crushing him.

Something, someone, cut off her head, yanked out her tongue. My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she's over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off.

This is a secretive age. Our secrets are our weapons. Think of South Africa, those clandestine meetings. Think of the covertness of families. Think of love. How else can we express mutiny but by the burial of our unspoken thoughts?

Well, what the heck, poets are supposed to be odd, aren't they?

If Pauline should see him close his eyes, she would never be offended or suspect boredom. She is fully conscious of her powers, appreciates the importance of good food, knows that books, particularly fiction, form a valuable core of experience, and believes she can trust Cruzzi absolutely to understand and follow the intricacies of her observations.

I love my thoughts, even when they take me up and down sour-smelling byways where I'd rather not venture. Whatever flickers on in my head is mine and I want it, all the blinking impulses and inclinations and connections and weirdness, and especially those bright purple flares that come streaming out of nowhere, announcing you're at some mystic juncture or turning point and that you'd better pay attention.

Hay partes del cuerpo que uno lleva consigo mismo durante toda la vida, pero que nunca posee realmente.

A deterioration has occurred to the fabric of the world, the world that does not belong to her as she has been told. Again and again and again. She is prohibited from entering. From now on life will seem less and less like life.

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