Top 50 Carol Shields Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Carol Shields

2. “It’s hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.”

— Carol Shields

3. “Here’s to another year and let’s hope it’s above ground.”

— Carol Shields

4. “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

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

— Carol Shields

6. “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.”

— Carol Shields

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

— Carol Shields

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Carol Shields

11. “Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, pray, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, just let go, just be.”

— Carol Shields

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

— Carol Shields

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Carol Shields

15. “I’m concerned about the unknowability of other people.”

— Carol Shields

16. “How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.”

— Carol Shields

17. “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

18. “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

19. “The silence is perfect, and yet a torment...”

— Carol Shields

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

— Carol Shields

21. “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

22. “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.”

— Carol Shields

23. “Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage.”

— Carol Shields

24. “The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course.”

— Carol Shields

25. “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.”

— Carol Shields

26. “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.”

— Carol Shields

27. “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.”

— Carol Shields

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren’t really, they weren’t allowed to be.”

— Carol Shields

31. “For some, religion is the cement that seals shut their door on the world.”

— Carol Shields

32. “I don’t know how to get things started... It’s like there’s this great big wheel I’ve got to start rolling only I don’t seem to have the muscles to get it going.”

— Carol Shields

33. “Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.”

— Carol Shields

34. “I like to chant a couple of lines of poetry into the ozone layer every day or so,” another caller says.”

— Carol Shields

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

— Carol Shields

36. “Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.”

— Carol Shields

37. “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.”

— Carol Shields

38. “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.”

— Carol Shields

39. “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.”

— Carol Shields

40. “From surfeit to loss is a short line.”

— Carol Shields

41. “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.”

— Carol Shields

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

— Carol Shields

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

— Carol Shields

44. “Either we’re all ordinary, or else none of us is ordinary.”

— Carol Shields

45. “Whenever I meet anyone new, I don’t say, “Tell me about your belief system.” I say, “Tell me about your average day”.”

— Carol Shields

46. “A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn’t ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.”

— Carol Shields

47. “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

48. “Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything’s in its place.”

— Carol Shields

49. “Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness – it’s too good, you see, too stupidly good.”

— Carol Shields

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

— Carol Shields