Carol Shields

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...

At the edge of every experience is the refracted light of recollection snagged there like an image in a beveled mirror.

Sometimes she looks at things close up and sometimes from a distance, and she does insist on showing herself in a sunny light, hardly ever giving us a glimpse of those dark premonitions we all experience.  And, oh dear, dear, she is cursed with the lonley woman's romantic imagination and this can support only happy endings.

He nurtures his connection from a distance...The rhythm is fixed in his life now - a support and distraction, the way in which he confirms his most human feelings.

It is inevitable that each of us will be misunderstood; this, it seems, is part of twentieth-century wisdom.

These are frightening times...when she feels herself annointed by loneliness.

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.

He is also calm, reflective and self-critical.  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.

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

He dares not concern himself with the future for fear of disturbing the present.