Carol Shields
The Stone Diaries is a novel by Carol Shields, and it stands as the work most prominently associated with her name — a book that drew honors from both sides of the Atlantic and from both nations she called home.
Shields was born on June 2, 1935, in Oak Park, Illinois, and carried both United States and Canadian citizenship throughout her life. She attended Oak Park and River Forest High School before continuing her education at Hanover College, the University of Exeter, and the University of Ottawa. Her working life encompassed several forms and roles: she wrote fiction, short stories, poetry, and biography, and she also taught at the university level. English was the language in which she worked across all of these modes.
The prizes that came to Shields were numerous and crossed national lines. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her standing in Canada was further marked by her appointment as a Companion of the Order of Canada and her election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada — distinctions that placed her among the most formally recognized writers in the country. Her other notable works include Larry's Party and Unless, titles that extended the range of her published fiction.
Shields died on July 16, 2003, in Victoria, British Columbia. Among the concrete facts that define the arc of her career, the breadth of her awards — spanning American, Canadian, and British institutions — reflects the reach of a body of work produced by a writer who held citizenship in two countries and pursued her craft across multiple literary forms. Unless remains among the named works she left behind.
Quotes by Carol Shields
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.
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.
Learning to skip has brought control into her life. Whenever she feels at all sad she switches into this wholly happy gait, sliding, hopping, and sliding again; when doing this, it seems as though her head separates from her body, making her feel dizzy and emptied out of bad thoughts. Does anyone else in the world know this trick, she wonders. Probably not, though her mother sometimes waves at her from the window, waves and smiles.
Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness – it’s too good, you see, too stupidly good.
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.
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.
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.
A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn’t ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.
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.