Top 100 Lionel Shriver Quotes
#1. You know you're going to have a good day when your morning begins with breakfast in the same room as Carrie Tiffany, David Vann and Lionel Shriver.
Hannah Kent
#2. Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.
Lionel Shriver
#3. 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
#4. I think that's the biggest favor you can grant anyone, don't you? Permission to be dull. I know Henry will sometimes say something so utterly uninteresting that I could faint. And that's when you know you're in love; the tedium isn't unbearable, it's lovely.
Lionel Shriver
#5. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and extremely specific.
Lionel Shriver
#6. We need to recognise that slowing population growth is one of the most cost-effective and reliable ways of easing pressure on our environment and securing a sustainable future for us all
Lionel Shriver
#7. Woe to those who spare no expense. I should know, since these are travelers who scorn AWAP for holidays in "foreign" countries so comfortable they qualify as near death experiences.
Lionel Shriver
#8. The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there's more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species.
Lionel Shriver
#9. Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
Lionel Shriver
#10. It's as if your money, by conceit inexhaustible, isn't real, so your generosity isn't real, either.
Lionel Shriver
#11. The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.
Lionel Shriver
#12. They could make profitable use of his ample winnings and see the world. Were he not on tour for most of the year, they could finally enjoy a home life - the simple pleasures of coffee and Daily Telegraphs, clean windows and daffodils, cabernet and Newsnight.
Lionel Shriver
#13. Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]
Lionel Shriver
#14. 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
#15. Still, I may have been glad to scratch the dry surface of our day-to-day peaceableness the way Violetta had clawed the sere crust on her limbs, anything to get something bright and liquid flowing again, out in the open and slippery between our fingers.
Lionel Shriver
#17. Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
Lionel Shriver
#18. Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
Lionel Shriver
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?
Lionel Shriver
#23. I didn't put in my diaphragm' I mumbled when we were through.
You stirred, 'Is it dangerous?'
'It's very dangerous,' I said.
Indeed, just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later. We might as well have left the door unlocked.
Lionel Shriver
#24. [Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.
Lionel Shriver
#25. Never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.
Lionel Shriver
#26. 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
#27. A well-constructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact, which will as easily make a pyramid as a platform.
Lionel Shriver
#29. In Kevin's book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.
Lionel Shriver
#30. 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
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Lionel Shriver
#35. It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.
Lionel Shriver
#36. Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn't mean it's fake.
Lionel Shriver
#37. Presenting emotions as facts-which they are-affords a fragile defense.
Lionel Shriver
#38. I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.
Lionel Shriver
#39. Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
Lionel Shriver
#41. That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
Lionel Shriver
#42. 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
#43. The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
Lionel Shriver
#44. 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
#45. I believe the impulse to write comes out of a failure to communicate by any other means.
Lionel Shriver
#47. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket.
Lionel Shriver
#48. 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
#49. Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.
Lionel Shriver
#50. It's not your job to be *pre-disappointed* for him, dig? You ... go on and on about how big and terrible 'the world' is. Well, maybe so. But in that case, it's the world's job to be big and terrible, not yours.
Lionel Shriver
#51. 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
#52. The liberation of adulthood as we'd conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed we became our own tyrants.
Lionel Shriver
#53. The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
#54. 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
#55. He had learned what all skilled liars register if they're ever to make a career of it: Always appropriate as much of the truth as possible. A wellconstructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact,
Lionel Shriver
#56. I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to.
Lionel Shriver
#57. Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.
Lionel Shriver
#58. Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
#59. Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.
Lionel Shriver
#60. 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
#61. But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
#62. Just cause you get used to something doesn't mean you like it." He added, snapping the magenta, "You're used to me.
Lionel Shriver
#63. We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.
Lionel Shriver
#64. 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
#66. And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.
Lionel Shriver
#67. The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
#68. I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.
Lionel Shriver
#70. In fact, because the unself-aware - which includes basically everybody - are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless.
Lionel Shriver
#71. Like most disguises, the cover-up was worse than honest flaw, a lesson I had yet to register on my own account.
Lionel Shriver
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. I mean when I was a kid, parents called the shots. Now I'm a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can't believe this.
Lionel Shriver
#76. You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.
Lionel Shriver
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin.
Lionel Shriver
#81. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel Shriver
#87. Language is alive, and you can't put it in the freezer. But
Lionel Shriver
#88. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you feel safe.
Lionel Shriver
#89. Kevin folded his arms and looked satisfied; I had gone back to playing Mother. "I knew exactly what I was doing." He leaned onto his elbows. "And I'd do it again." "I
Lionel Shriver
#90. It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
#92. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known.
Lionel Shriver
#93. Hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
#94. Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it's not as pretty.
Lionel Shriver
#95. Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you'd think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it.
Lionel Shriver
#96. Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.
Lionel Shriver
#98. You had bought us some other family's dream house.
Lionel Shriver
#99. It's queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them
Lionel Shriver
#100. People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver
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