89 Quotes by Carol Shields

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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