Carol Shields

“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, Small Ceremonies

“It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.”
― Carol Shields, The Republic of Love

“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, Small Ceremonies

“Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“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, The Stone Diaries

“Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.”
― Carol Shields, The Orange Fish