The Stone Diaries Quotes
"Each time that I read The Stone Diaries I see it differently."
"You read it first as such, drawn in at once by the compelling opening pages."
"It can be seen as a discussion of the nature of evidence—the way in which there is no single truth about anyone’s life, but as many truths as there are observers."
"The whole novel is a cunning tapestry of evidence."
"Any novelist is of course in the happy position of being omniscient—of knowing everything about everybody."
"The Stone Diaries respects chronology, it gives us the arc of Daisy’s life from birth to death."
"Readers demand coherence; confuse them and you have lost them."
"The Stone Diaries is a relatively short novel that seems long, an effect created by its structure."
"In all of her fiction, Carol Shields excels at character creation."
"I have eaten bitterness, and find I have a taste for it."
"Pin money, she would have called it, in her simple way."
"The miracle of stone is that a rigid, inert mass can be lifted out of the ground and given wings."
"You can be sweetness or bitterness, lightness or darkness, a force of energy or indolence, a fighter or a laggard."
"She wants to want something but doesn’t know what she is allowed."
"The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women."
"The unfairness of this—that a single dramatic episode can shave the fine thistles from a woman’s life."
"The erotic realm is our nearest approach to the wild half of our nature."
"Our wont is to put up with things, with the notion that men behave in one manner, and women in another."
"She is unable to stop her young husband from drinking on their wedding night."
"He longs for correction, for love like a scalpel, a whip, something to curb his wild impulses and morbidity."
"A part of her consciousness drifts toward sleep where she will be safe."
"The weather was with him, long soft days and evenings, and the ground dry and giving underfoot."
"What he actually puts down is a plain: yours sincerely, Barker Flett."
"A person arbitrarily named. A person accidentally misplaced."
"To still the loud beating of her heart she stows her journal away safely."
"The moths flit back and forth between his bedside lamp and hers."
"He dreams of weeds tangled at the edge of a lake, of the breasts of a young girl, their hard tips."
"Memory could be poked with a stick, savored in the mouth like a popsicle."
"How do you explain a thing like that? Well, it was kind of a miracle, though not happy like most miracles are."
"Once you start thinking about the air rushing in and out of your body, your breath has a way of getting stuck in your throat."
"She may be crowded out of her own life, but she possesses the startling ability to draft alternate versions."
"Her garden, these good friends claim, is so enchanting in its look of settledness and its caressing movements of shade and light."
"I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination, and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own will."
"Her rusty-gray frizz fluffs out over her forehead and ears—sometimes she brushes her hair before settling down to work and sometimes she doesn’t."
"What do women want, Freud asked. The old fool, the charlatan."
"The sexual spasm, despite its hideous embarrassments and inconvenience, is the way we enter the realm of the ecstatic."
"There comes a time, I’ve seen it happen, when women offer to decode themselves."
"The self is curved like space, and human beings can come around again and again to the sharpness of early excitations."
"A question mark went into the diary instead of the usual data."
"In that question mark I read the possible end of my erotic life."
"Something to do with shame, though I won’t yet admit it."
"Myself, I don’t think it’s her change of life that’s done it, or her allergies either."
"A person can make herself sick and that same person has to will herself to get well again."
"No, I won’t see the chaplain today," she says with dignity, with what she believes is dignity.
"Have you tried," she says at last, "not being gay."
"Not if we take our Christian faith seriously—"
"I’m still in here," she thinks, rocking herself to consciousness.