89 Quotes by Carol Shields

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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