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The Collected Stories of Carol Shields QUOTES

The Collected Stories of Carol Shields QUOTES

1 " I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I’m not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.) "

― Carol Shields , The Collected Stories of Carol Shields

2 " I reminded the reporter that sonnet means “little sound.” “Oh,” she said, and I could tell by the way her pen jumped in her hand that she was charmed by the idea; people almost always are. Sonnets are taken so strenuously, so literally, when taught at school, or at least they used to be, and the definition—fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter—hardens and ends up gesturing toward an artifact, an object one might construct from a kit. But if you picture the sonnet, instead, as a little sound, a ping in the great wide silent world, you make visible a sudden fluidity to the form, a splash of noise, but a carefully measured splash that’s saved from preciosity by the fact that it comes from within the body’s own borders; one voice, one small note extended, and then bent; the bending is everything, the volta, the turn, and also important is where it occurs within the sonnet’s “scanty plot of ground,” to quote old Wordsworth. From there the “little sound” sparks and then forms itself out of the dramatic contrasts of private light and darkness. "

― Carol Shields , The Collected Stories of Carol Shields

3 " It grieved him to think of that paltry, guarded, nut-like thing that was his artistic reputation. "

― Carol Shields , The Collected Stories of Carol Shields

4 " The expression terminal, when the doctor first pronounced it, had struck Meershank with a comic bounce, this after a lifetime of pursuing puns for a living. His scavenger self immediately pictured a ghostly airline terminal in which scurrying men and women trotted briskly to and fro in hospital gowns. "

― Carol Shields , The Collected Stories of Carol Shields

5 " Almost everyone agrees with her. However much they look into her eyes and think she is uttering mere niceties, they are sworn to that ultimate courtesy, which is to believe what people want us to believe. And thus, when Mrs. Willow bids them good afternoon, they courteously rise to their feet. “Good afternoon,” they smile back, shaking hands carefully, and postponing their slow, rhythmic applause and the smashing of the teacups. "

― Carol Shields , The Collected Stories of Carol Shields