Life & Wisdom Quote by Carol Shields

Shields doesn’t romanticize language as decoration; she frames it as infrastructure. “Words are our life” is blunt on purpose, a refusal of the modern fantasy that we can live on vibes, images, and half-signals. The line “We are human because we use language” sounds like a calm definition, but it’s really a value judgment: language isn’t just a tool we happen to wield, it’s the medium that makes a self legible to others and even to itself. In Shields’s fiction, ordinary lives turn on the pressure of what gets said, what can’t be said, and what is said badly; speech isn’t garnish, it’s fate.

The provocative turn comes at the end: “less human when we use less language.” That’s not a scold about vocabulary quizzes. It’s a warning about compression and retreat. When language shrinks, the range of thought shrinks with it: fewer distinctions, fewer chances to revise yourself, fewer ways to tell the truth without turning it into a slogan. Shields is also implicitly defending literature’s slow, exacting attention against a culture that rewards speed and abbreviation. In her era, that might mean sound bites and bureaucratic euphemism; now it reads like an indictment of text-thread minimalism, algorithmic phrasing, and the way public life nudges us toward the safest, flattest sentences.

The subtext is tender but unsentimental: to speak fully is to risk misunderstanding, but to stop trying is a kind of self-erasure.