Carol Shields Quotes

And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in for ever.

This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends.

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

When you read a book [The Hunger Games], you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination. In the book, it's great when she can push a button and food comes up, as per your order.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

If I'm engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.

That's what books are for... to travel without moving an inch.

A book… it’s a world all on its own too. A world made of words, where you live for a while.

You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.

A little known fact: I read all the time. books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only for a little while.

Books make me feel safe. Books make me feel normal.

I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.

There's still nothing like a book to really make you feel like you've disappeared into a world.

I have sought for happiness everywhere, but I have found it nowhere except in a little corner with a little book.

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

It is both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book...from the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.

I was afraid you had deceased,' he said. 'Or gotten engrossed in a long book.

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

I have always loved reading. Ever since I was a young girl I had a book by my bed and would get lost in the world of make believe.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.