Lionel Shriver Quotes & Sayings

I have never in all my life considered you other people. — Lionel Shriver

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

Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't. — Lionel Shriver

Now, over the years I've been forced to conclude that most celebrations don't work. The more carefully planned a signal occasion, the more likely it will trickle by on a pale tide of dilute well-meaningness. Christmases, birthdays, award ceremonies, and weddings are swallowed by planning and preparation on the one side and cleaning up on the other, and almost never seem to have actually happened. — Lionel Shriver

It was a whole world, his mouth, a whole unsuspected world, and kissing him occasioned the same sense of discovery as sliding a clear drop of plain tap water under a microscope and divining whole schools of fantastic fibrillose creatures, or pointing a telescope at a patch of sky pitch-dark to the naked eye and lo, it is spattered with stars. — Lionel Shriver

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

Sure...the boy was precocious. But having been precocious himself, Lowell was never wowed by teenagers who could recite the periodic table of elements or whatever. He was on to them. Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing the less you listened and the less you learned. Worse, with application less glibly gifted peers often caught up with or overtook prodigies by early adulthood, and meanwhile the kid to whom everything came so effortlessly never mastered the grind of sheer hard work. — Lionel Shriver

You know that euphemism, she's expecting? It's apt. The birth of a baby, so long as it's healthy, is something to look forward to. It's a good thing, a big, good, huge event. And from thereon in, every good things, too," I added hurriedly, "but also, you know, first steps, first dates, first places in sack races. Kids, they graduate, they marry, they have kids themselves- in a way, you get to do everything twice. Even if our kid had problems," I supposed idiotically, "at least they wouldn't be our same old problems ... " (22) — Lionel Shriver

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

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. — Lionel Shriver

You see," I proceeded, "by the time he was eleven or twelve, this was all too late. The no-gun rules, the computer codes ... 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. We want to be able to tell ourselves what good parents we are, that we're doing our best. If I had it all to do over again, I'd have let Kevin play with whatever he wanted; he liked little enough. And I'd have ditched the TV rules, the G-rated videos. They only made us look foolish. They underscored our powerlessness, and they provoked his contempt. — Lionel Shriver

Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal. — Lionel Shriver

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story. — Lionel Shriver

Okay, it's like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening. You read the paper, or if you're into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you'll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching. And you know, it's got so bad that I've started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half the time they're watching TV. Or if you've got some romance in a movie? What to they do but go to a movie? All those people, Marlin," he invited the interviewer in with a nod. "What are they watching?"
After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, "You tell us, Kevin."
"People like me. — Lionel Shriver

Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it - the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight. — Lionel Shriver

But you said that if the U.S. were to fall or founder during your lifetime, collapse economically, be overrun by an aggressor, or corrupt from within into something vicious, you would weep. I — Lionel Shriver

Beware of what "everybody says". — Lionel Shriver

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

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable. — Lionel Shriver

In Kevin's book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful. — Lionel Shriver

[T]he cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain. — Lionel Shriver

Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn't mean it's fake. — Lionel Shriver

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

What strikes me as people in diners rail at each other at the counter when before they ate in silence is not how imperiled they feel, but how safe. Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment. But — Lionel Shriver

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

Real poverty is about doing what you have to do as opposed to what you want. — Lionel Shriver

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

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

The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person's company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one's existence - for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings. Hands — Lionel Shriver

You restored me to the concept of home. — Lionel Shriver

Once I was no longer fussing with my coat, he said, "You may be fooling the neighbors and the guards and Jesus and your gaga mother with these goody-goody visits of yours, but you're not fooling me. Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don't be dragging your ass back here on my account." Then he added, "Because I hate you." I — Lionel Shriver

Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo - charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry. — Lionel Shriver

Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing- reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mouths- all seemed like pictures of someone else. I dreaded confrontation with what could prove a closed, stony nature, my own selfishness and lack of generosity, the thick tarry powers of my own resentment. However intrigued by a "turn of the page," I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very surmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness , was in the end what attracted me to it. (32) — Lionel Shriver

So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am. — Lionel Shriver

I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary. — Lionel Shriver

Presenting emotions as facts-which they are-affords a fragile defense. — Lionel Shriver

Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over. — Lionel Shriver

A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress. For that matter, that is the nature of resentment, the objection we cannot express. It is silence more than the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic, like poisons the body won't pee away. — Lionel Shriver

Franklin, the whole house was on Zoloft. — Lionel Shriver

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

At only ten a.m., Edgar found himself already eyeing the Doritos on the counter. One thing he hadn't anticipated about the 'home office' was Snack Syndrome; lately his mental energies divided evenly between his new calling (worrying about money, which substituted neatly for earning it) and not stuffing his face. — Lionel Shriver

It is always difficult to impress the ignorant. — Lionel Shriver

My story is about all I got to my name right now, and that's why I feel robbed. But a story's a whole lot more than most people got. All you people watching out there, you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot. Bought and paid for. That's what all you people want, and why you're sucking off me. You want my plot. I know how you feel too, since hey, I used to feel the same way. TV and video games and movies and computer screens ... On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee. Ever since, I've known what my life is about. I give good story. It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it. You ate it up. Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll. Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, 'cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president's dog. — Lionel Shriver

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed. — Lionel Shriver

Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd
slavery, incest, a suicide
I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I've learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. I'd readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away. — Lionel Shriver

Time hangs off me like molting skin. — Lionel Shriver

With relish, Kevin explained the boy's claim to fame: An elderly couple in an adjacent apartment had complained about how loudly he played his CDs of the Monkees at three in the morning. The next weekend, the couple's daughter discovered her parents in their bed, slit from crotch to throat. "That's appalling," I said. "I can't believe anyone still listens to the Monkees. — Lionel Shriver

For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul. — Lionel Shriver

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

When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear. — Lionel Shriver

It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in. — Lionel Shriver

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. 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. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part. — Lionel Shriver

I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself. — Lionel Shriver

Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile. — Lionel Shriver

unto me a son was born, and I felt nothing. — Lionel Shriver

Are we talking a white dress and reception? Because I've been to loads of weddings, and I've had it. Friends resent the plane tickets and hotel bills; the happy couple resents the catering. Both parties think they're doing the other a huge favor. The hoo-ha is over before you know it, and all anyone's got to show for it is a hangover. Weddings are a racket, and the only people who profit are florists and bartenders. — Lionel Shriver

The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar. — Lionel Shriver

It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness. — Lionel Shriver

Whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed. — Lionel Shriver

Then, you were always captivated by self-sacrifice. However admirable, your eagerness to give your life over to another person may have been due in some measure to the fact that when your life was wholly in your lap you didn't know what to do with it. Self-sacrifice was an easy way out. — Lionel Shriver

His face churned. That was the point, before he said a word, that he broke her heart. The contortion of those muscles paraded a decision over whether to tell her the truth. Once he finally spoke, Lawrence's opting for the honesty route didn't nearly compensate for the fact that candor had been a choice. For an alternative direction to have beckoned, it was probably well trod. — Lionel Shriver

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

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

He didn't like to be seen needing it - as if hunger were a sign of weakness. — Lionel Shriver

Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water. — Lionel Shriver

Someone had to insert a note of peevishness into this hellishly halcyon Keep Calm and Carry On. Generating some reputable resentment, giving voice to the free-floating outrage that imbued their environs like smoke from a burnt dinner - it was a job to do, as Avery's tireless goodwill was a job. With corresponding self-sacrifice, he'd taken on the less glamorous task of reminding the rest that this sucked, it all sucked, it wasn't fair! — Lionel Shriver

Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110] — Lionel Shriver

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

How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out? — Lionel Shriver

It was a short session of the simple being-ness that he had long coveted for The Afterlife. What Glynis had called "doing nothing," The smelling and seeing and hearing and small noticings of sheer animal presence in the world surely constituted activity of a sort, perhaps the most important kind. This was a form of companionship that he'd been especially cherishing with Glynis of late: devoid of conversation, but so surprising in its contrast to being by yourself. — Lionel Shriver

...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

One of us could always get pancreatic cancer," you said pleasantly. — Lionel Shriver

He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing. — Lionel Shriver

Remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be obscurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeers. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around
well, it just didn't seem that different. — Lionel Shriver

But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon. — Lionel Shriver

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

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home. — Lionel Shriver

Blame confers an awesome power. And it's simplifying, not only to onlookers and victims but to culprits most of all. It imposes order on slag. Blame conveys clear lessons in which others may take comfort: if only she hadn't -- , and by implication makes tragedy avoidable. There may even be a fragile peace to be found in the assumption of total responsibility... — Lionel Shriver

Fear is an isometric exercise — Lionel Shriver

Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain - which — Lionel Shriver

It's queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them — Lionel Shriver

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

She had some appreciation for folks with a greed for sensation. Who were determined to "squeeze the orange" and press fresh experience from every day. But that way lay burnout. There were only so many experiences, really- a depressing discovery in itself., and surely you were better off trying to replicate the pleasing ones as often as possible. — Lionel Shriver

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

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

They had no comprehension of why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn't pretty. — Lionel Shriver

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

I bask in their heatedness as before a woodstove. My own apathy is bone chilling. — Lionel Shriver

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment. — Lionel Shriver

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

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't. — Lionel Shriver

So many stories are determined before they start. — Lionel Shriver

You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it's the fault of somebody who's dead. — Lionel Shriver

We white folks cling to such an abiding sense of entitlement that when things go amiss, we cannot let go of this tortuously sunny, idiotically cheerful doppelganger of a world that we deserve in which life is swell. — Lionel Shriver

Take me less seriously.) 10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother could feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.) Those, as best I can recall, are the pygmy misgivings I weighed beforehand, and I've tried not to — Lionel Shriver

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

He could see how this liberating condition could grow progressive. How in the face of an end game there was virtually no limit to what did not matter. Returned — Lionel Shriver

The secret is that there is no secret. — Lionel Shriver

If Edgar sounded overeager, even rushed, the race was with his own temperament. He placed a premium on savvy. Yet since you could only obtain new information by admitting you didn't know it already, savvy required an apprenticeship as a naive twit. You had to ask crude, obvious questions ... you had to sit still while worldly-wise warhorses ... fired withering glances as if you were born yesterday.
Well, Edgar was born yesterday for the moment, although his tolerance for being treated liked a simpleton was in short supply. He'd needed to rattle off a multitude of stupid questions before he embraced his next incarnation as an insider. The trouble was that savvy coated your brain in plastic like a driver's license: nothing more could get in. Hence the point at which you decided you knew everything was exactly the point at which you became an ignorant dipshit. — Lionel Shriver

There's no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary. — Lionel Shriver