Carol Shields Quotes

A great deal of what people say, think, or do is actually motivate by fear, which of course is always linked with having your focus on the future and being out of touch with the Now. As there are no problems in the Now, there is no fear either.

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.

You can't sit there and worry about everything.

Put out of your mind what is past and do not fret and worry about what has not yet come to pass.

Balance lives in the present. The surest way to lose your footing is to focus on what dreadful things might happen.

Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?

Don't worry about the past and don't try to solve the future.

What if I told you that 10 years from now, your life would be exactly the same? I doubt you would be happy. So, why are you so afraid of change?

There are always a lot of people so afraid of rocking the boat that they stop rowing. We can never get ahead that way.

Just handle what is in front of you now and the future will take care of itself. Otherwise, you'll spend most of your life wondering which foot you'll use to step off the curb when you're still only halfway to the corner.

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

Stop longing.You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.

But I dare not think too far into the future on the risk that I'll miss the present.

My life used to be like that game of freeze tag we played as kids. Once tagged, you had to freeze in the position you were in. Whenever something happened, I'd freeze like a statue, too afraid of moving the wrong way, of making the wrong decision. The problem is, if you stand still too long, that's your decision.

You freeze with the number of opportunities given to you and just decide to do nothing at all.

The only risk we run is by doing nothing.

We carve out risk-free lives where nothing happens.

Show business is, essentially, a fear-based industry.

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection - you cannot cope with the future.

Change creates fear, and technology creates change. Sadly, most people don't behave very well when they are afraid.

I think that people are so insecure in their jobs, they're so uncertain that the people they work for really care about them, they're so uncertain about what their kids are looking at in the future, that people are reluctant to take any risks for change.