Quotes from The Stone Diaries

“Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“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, quote from 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, quote from The Stone Diaries

“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, quote from The Stone Diaries

“Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body's smoothe, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible. We take for granted that our forbears were imbued with a deeper purity of purpose than we possess nowadays, and a more singular set of mind, believing, for example, that early scientists pursued their ends with unbroken „dedication“ and that artists worked in the flame of some perpetual „inspiration“. But none of this is true. Those who went before us were every bit as wayward and unaccountable and unsteady in their longings as people are today. The least breeze, whether it be sexual or psychological – or even a real breeze, carrying with it the refreshment of oxygene and energy – has the power to turn us from our path.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the kindest thing I can say for it. Other are required, other perspectives, but even so our most important ceremonies – birth, love, and death – are secured by whomever and whatever is available. What chance, what caprice!”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“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, quote from The Stone Diaries

“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.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn't ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, pray, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, just let go, just be.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“I don't know how to get things started... It's like there's this great big wheel I've got to start rolling only I don't seem to have the muscles to get it going.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“He was discomfited to see how easily men (and women as well) stepped from the train to station platform, from platform to train – with ease, with levity, laughing and talking and greeting each other as though oblivious to the abrupt geographical shifts they were making, and disrespectful of the distance and differences they entered. Many were hatless, their clothes brightly colored. The cases they carried appeared, from the way they handled them, to be feather-light.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“Time and chance. The twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“…it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“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.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“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.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“Curiously, she is not afraid, knowing as she does that love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and furthermore, she is accustomed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or crowding her concerns into a shadowy corner.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“It is miracle enough to find that love lies in his grasp, that it can be spoken aloud, that he, so diffident, so slow, so thwarted by the poverty of his own beginnings, is able to put into words the fevers of his heart and at the same time offer up the endearments a woman needs to hear. The knowledge shocked him at first, how language flowed straight out of him like a river in flood, but once the words burst from his throat it was as though he had found his true tongue. He cannot imagine, thinking back, why he had believed himself incapable of passionate expression.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“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.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

“From surfeit to loss is a short line.”
― Carol Shields, quote from The Stone Diaries

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