List of Carol Shields Quotes

In A Long And Healthy Life, Which Is What Most Of Us Have, There Is Plenty Of Time.

The Silence Is Perfect, And Yet A Torment.

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.

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.

Here's To Another Year And Let's Hope It's Above Ground.

I'm Concerned About The Unknowability Of Other People.

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.

It's The Arrangement Of Events Which Makes The Stories. It's Throwing Away, Compressing, Underlining. Hindsight Can Give Structure To Anything, But You Have To Be Able To See It. Breathing, Waking And Sleeping: Our Lives Are Steamed And Shaped Into Stories. Knowing That Is What Keeps Me From Going Insane, And Though I Don't Like To Admit It, Sometimes It's The Only Thing.

These Are Frightening Times...when She Feels Herself Annointed By Loneliness.

Our Friendship Is Made Up Of These Brief Frenzied Exchanges, But The Quality Of Our Conversation, For All Its Feverish Outpouring, Is Genuine.

Eventually, Everything Gets Stuck Between A Pair Of Parentheses Or Buried In The Bottom Of A Trunk.

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