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cbe6252
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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ddbe83c
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This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.
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Carol Shields |
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1670f1c
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There are chapters in every life which are seldom read, and certainly not aloud.
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Carol Shields |
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59033c8
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Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.
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living
humor
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Carol Shields |
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09a45fd
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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
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Carol Shields |
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c6bfde6
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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.
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reading
books
subtlety
readers
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Carol Shields |
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2fac7a6
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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a07487c
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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
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Carol Shields |
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a9e3a46
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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5c36395
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It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.
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Carol Shields |
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839c93a
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Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.
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Carol Shields |
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0e484a4
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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cd00a62
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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38ce46d
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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26381e2
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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62cf163
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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24eb21e
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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.
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words
literature
reading
connection
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Carol Shields |
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3e3592b
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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 ,,inspirat..
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Carol Shields |
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dc03f8b
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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!
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Carol Shields |
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e81ff4c
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Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .
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Carol Shields |
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51d8d4f
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A thought comes into her head: that lately she doesn't ask herself what is possible, but rather what possibilities remain.
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Carol Shields |
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2b40b06
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What I'd like is a lobotomy, a clean job, the top of my head neatly sawn off and designated contents removed.
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Carol Shields |
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aabc146
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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?
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women
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Carol Shields |
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d61406d
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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072da0d
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Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.
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Carol Shields |
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05d7f25
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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.
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poetry
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Carol Shields |
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7c390c5
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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? Month..
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time
past
waste
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Carol Shields |
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e6ed5f2
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A glance can both submit and subvert; it can be sharp or shy, scornful or adoring; it can be a near cousin to scrutiny - but it almost always assumes a degree of mutually encoded knowledge. A spark is struck and apprehended; the head turns on it's spinal axis; the shoulders freeze; the eyes are the only busy part of the body, simultaneously receiving and sending out information, so that a glance becomes more than a glance. It is a weapon, a..
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Carol Shields |
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1bca58d
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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.
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starting
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Carol Shields |
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e750d1c
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His voice, you might say, became the place where he lived, the way other people live in their furniture or gestures
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Carol Shields |
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72b0aeb
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Routine is liberating, it makes you feel in control.
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Carol Shields |
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cf89555
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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..
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Carol Shields |
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58eaeea
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she herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. "I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know."
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Carol Shields |
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890b35f
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Time and chance. The twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates.
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Carol Shields |
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1569168
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To be a romantic is to believe anything can happen to us.
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Carol Shields |
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25e3cb0
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I've had lots of happy moments. I've been lucky. But I always think the happiest moment hasn't happened yet. I'm talking about the queen of happy moments. The biggie. The unfathomable. The epitome of happiness. The only thing is, I worry that when it comes along I won't recognize it. It'll be flashing away there at the edge of my vision and I'll be looking so hard that I'll just let it float right by.
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Carol Shields |
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ed38fab
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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ea5244d
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The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course.
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Carol Shields |
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b8ee822
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I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little derisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending--these eat up a woman's creativity, anyone's creativity. But I've been watching the ways she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even..
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Carol Shields |
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45ccee3
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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8aaba14
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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..
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Carol Shields |
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61b5518
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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.
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Carol Shields |
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4355ab0
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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.
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routine-of-daily-life
invisibility
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Carol Shields |
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64c2eec
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Nothing matters except for the harvest, the gathering in, the adding up, the bringing together, the whole story, the way it happens and happens and goes on happening. (from "Collision")"
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Carol Shields |