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.

Carol Shields

Categorized in : Sleep Knowing Breathing

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Carol Shields

monologues my-own novel

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.

Carol Shields

want writing book

Go for long walks,

Carol Shields

long-walks blessing letting-go

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

reading book moving

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

powerful morning fall

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Carol Shields

self-discovery chapters

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

Carol Shields

childhood certain light

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

long people thinking

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

language use thinking

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

Carol Shields

movement light said

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

Carol Shields

life-is stories life

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

Carol Shields

scolding voice moving

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

weight adventure men

It occurs to her that she should record this flash of insight in her journal - otherwise she is sure to forget, for she is someone who is always learning and forgetting and obliged to learn again.

Carol Shields

records learning forget

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.

Carol Shields

mother discovery thinking

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.

Carol Shields

nurse heart love-is

Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

Carol Shields

glasses different moving

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

knowing want hands

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.

Carol Shields

dare future fear

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.

Carol Shields

feeling-lonely loneliness feels