Carol Shields
Carol Shields
Carol Ann Shields, CC OM FRSCwas an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 June 1935
CountryCanada
people concerned
I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.
long healthy healthy-life
In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.
selfish maturity years
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.
adventure men weight
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?
heart love-is nurse
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.
mother thinking discovery
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.
stars thinking anxiety
And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly. Clarity bursts upon her a spray of little stars. She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it.. The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through. She may be crowded out of her own life - she knows this for a fact and has always know it - but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternative versions.
mother children unique
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.
thinking use language
Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.
hard-work persons hard
It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.
chapters self-discovery
There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.
thinking long people
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.
moving voice scolding
The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.
light movement said
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