Top 100 Lionel Shriver Quotes
#1. You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.
Lionel Shriver
#2. It's not that I have no shame. Rather, I'm exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint. It is not an emotion that leads anywhere.
Lionel Shriver
#3. I wondered if that wasn't the answer to the mystery, countrywide. It wasn't that eating was so great-it wasn't-but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay.
Lionel Shriver
#4. Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement.
Lionel Shriver
#5. The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
#6. Yet in my experience, when left to their own devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.
Lionel Shriver
#7. It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known- as if progressive intimacy didn't involve becoming more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant.
Lionel Shriver
#8. A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.
Lionel Shriver
#9. The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
#10. People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver
#11. It's queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them
Lionel Shriver
#12. You had bought us some other family's dream house.
Lionel Shriver
#13. Hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
#14. It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
#15. Sometimes things end worse for one side than the other. These 'injured parties' always seem to see themselves as victims of a moral outrage. They never feel simply rejected, but also abused. I've known many women who were great believers in the curative powers of indignation.
Lionel Shriver
#16. Language is alive, and you can't put it in the freezer. But
Lionel Shriver
#17. You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel Shriver
#18. What did I expect, that you would wrap my rib cage with those enormous hands in which horses must be measured, lifting me overhead with the stern reproach that is every Western woman's sly delight, "You're too thin"?
Lionel Shriver
#19. Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.
Lionel Shriver
#20. But after I'd survived for so long on the scraps from my own emotional table, you spoiled me with a daily banquet of complicitous what-an-asshole looks at parties, surprise bouquets for no occasion, and fridge-magnet notes that always signed off XXXX, Franklin.
Lionel Shriver
#21. The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.
Lionel Shriver
#22. To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.
Lionel Shriver
#24. I can't imagine that I'm supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense.
Lionel Shriver
#25. How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?
Lionel Shriver
#26. I'd get this, I luuuuuuuv you, buddy! stuff, and I'd just look at him like, Who are you talking to, guy? What does that mean, your dad 'loves' you and hasn't a [bleep]ing clue who you are? What's he love then? Some kid in Happy Days. Not me.
Lionel Shriver
#27. In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Lionel Shriver
#28. Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
Lionel Shriver
#29. Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
Lionel Shriver
#30. I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive.
Lionel Shriver
#31. Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]
Lionel Shriver
#32. The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.
Lionel Shriver
#33. It's as if your money, by conceit inexhaustible, isn't real, so your generosity isn't real, either.
Lionel Shriver
#34. Whenever I see fat people, they're eating," I ruminated safely out of the diner's earshot. "Don't give me this it's glands or genes or a slow metabolism rubbish. It's food. They're fat because they eat the wrong food, too much of it, and all the time.
Lionel Shriver
#35. For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis
I don't care!"
"Huh," I considered. "I guess I don't either".
"Most people don't! All they care about," he added grimly, "is being right".
Lionel Shriver
#36. Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.
Lionel Shriver
#37. The gap between most people's capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean.
Lionel Shriver
#39. It wasn't that eating was so great
it wasn't
but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything that was decidedly less than okay.
Lionel Shriver
#40. I was disquieted to realize that he had ceased to call me anything at all. That seemed impossible, but your children generally use your name when they want something, if only attention, and Kevin was loath to beseech me for so much as a turned head.
Lionel Shriver
#41. Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
Lionel Shriver
#42. Presenting emotions as facts-which they are-affords a fragile defense.
Lionel Shriver
#43. Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Lionel Shriver
#44. I don't understand why doctors don't advise everybody to lay on twenty extra pounds while they've got the chance. I might not advocate outright obesity, but there's a reason for fat - it's a resource.
Lionel Shriver
#46. You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.
Lionel Shriver
#47. I see now what they mean by "holding your head high," and I am sometimes surprised by how much interior transformation a ramrod posture can afford. When I stand physically proud, I feel a small measure less mortified.
Lionel Shriver
#48. A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.
Lionel Shriver
#49. There's something nihilistic about not having children
Lionel Shriver
#50. They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.
Lionel Shriver
#51. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.
Lionel Shriver
#52. He's one of those attorneys who think of the law as a game, not a morality play. I'm told that'd the kind you want.
Lionel Shriver
#54. The good life doesn't knock on the door.
Joy is a job.
Lionel Shriver
#55. I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.
Lionel Shriver
#56. Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you, when they didn't?
Lionel Shriver
#57. Trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.
Lionel Shriver
#58. I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
#59. I suspect that children want their parents to be busy; they don't want to have to fill your schedule with their paltry needs. Children want to be assured that there are other things to do, important things; more important, on occasion, than they are.
Lionel Shriver
#60. Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better.
Lionel Shriver
#61. Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
Lionel Shriver
#62. He was already intuiting that attachment - if only to a squirt gun - made him vulnerable.
Lionel Shriver
#64. This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen.
Lionel Shriver
#65. Frankly, the reason why lawyers were compensated so lavishly was that they were paid to attend to the most stultifying aspects of modern life.
Lionel Shriver
#66. I always prefer socializing at night-it is implicitly more wanton
Lionel Shriver
#67. Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn't a very nice sensation not to want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing.
Lionel Shriver
#68. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship, it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help.
Lionel Shriver
#69. That it was valuable rather than merely expensive. Ramsey's
Lionel Shriver
#70. It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.
Lionel Shriver
#71. I bask in their heatedness as before a woodstove. My own apathy is bone chilling.
Lionel Shriver
#72. [T]he cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain.
Lionel Shriver
#73. Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.
Lionel Shriver
#74. For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul.
Lionel Shriver
#75. ...like that legendary journey that begins with a single step, I had already embarked upon my first resentment.
A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress.
Lionel Shriver
#77. I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.
Lionel Shriver
#78. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
#79. Even if he doesn't go to college, he could at least learn to make something. Nobody in this country knows how to sink a nail anymore. They're all dependent on the tradesmen their kids are taught not to become.
Lionel Shriver
#80. How lucky we are, when we are spared what we think we want!
Lionel Shriver
#81. I wondered why people ever tried to accomplish anything when attainment of every sort was inbuilt with the forlorn 'Well so
what's next?
Lionel Shriver
#82. Dr. Rhinestein did not test for malice, for spiteful indifference, or for congenital meanness. If they could, I wonder how many fish we might throw back.
Lionel Shriver
#83. I long ago gave up defending humanity. It's beyond me on most days to defend myself.
Lionel Shriver
#84. After all, she had announced at our introduction in September that she "simply loves children," Miss Fabricant, with a blunt snub of a nose like a Charlotte potato and hips like Idahos, the infeasible assertion seems to decode, "I want to get married.
Lionel Shriver
#85. There's no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary.
Lionel Shriver
#86. One of us could always get pancreatic cancer," you said pleasantly.
Lionel Shriver
#88. The very insurmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness, was in the end what attracted me to it.
Lionel Shriver
#89. I have never in all my life considered you other people.
Lionel Shriver
#90. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.
Lionel Shriver
#91. I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
Lionel Shriver
#92. my mother sees chaos biting at her doorstep, while the rest of us inhabit a fabricated playscape whose benevolence is a collective delusion.
Lionel Shriver
#93. Exasperatingly, we're all pretty much restricted to learning what people are like with the permanent confound of our own presence, which is why those chance glimpses of someone you love just walking down the street can seem so precious.
Lionel Shriver
#94. Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.
Lionel Shriver
#96. But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules; nothing.
Lionel Shriver
#98. This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling mad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.
Lionel Shriver
#99. Should what you get up to fail to comport with who you think you are, something is surely inaccurate (and likely optimistic) about who you think you are.
Lionel Shriver
#100. Violence is anything an airplane can do to a cloud
Lionel Shriver
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