32+ Carol Shields Quotes On Education, Art And Empathetic

Carol Shields was a Canadian author who wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995 for her novel The Stone Diaries. Shields was also a professor at the University of Manitoba and was the first female Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Carol Shields on education, life, art.

Top 10 Carol Shields Quotes

1. This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.
2. 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.
3. Go for long walks, indulge in hot baths, Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, Just let go, Just be.
4. There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.
• Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.
• It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.
• Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.
• 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.
• Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.
• The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.
• The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.

Carol Shields Quotes About Life

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

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

In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time. — Carol Shields

The recounting of a life is a cheat...even our own stories are obscenely distorted. — Carol Shields

nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the movement of possible music — Carol Shields

Carol Shields Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Carol Shields

1. Carol Shields emphasizes the importance of living life to its fullest and cherishing the moments we have with our loved ones. She encourages us to be mindful of our relationships and to strive for meaningful connections with those around us.
2. Shields also encourages us to be open to new experiences and to embrace the beauty of the world around us. She encourages us to take risks and to be brave in the face of adversity.
3. Finally, Shields encourages us to be kind and compassionate to those around us and to strive to make the world a better place. She reminds us to be grateful for the blessings we have and to use our talents to make a positive difference in the world.