Shriver Quotes & Sayings

Jews have suffered persecution from misguided Christians who tortured the Jews for their part in killing Christ. These Christians forgot that Christ died because of the sins of all men. — Sargent Shriver

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

Children without access to quality early education programs start kindergarten with an 18-month disadvantage, and that gap continues to widen. By the time they are in fourth grade, many cannot do math or read at grade level. — Mark Shriver

Violence is anything an airplane can do to a cloud — Lionel Shriver

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

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

I'm only asking you to stop every so often and turn off your mobile device, put down the Angry Birds and the Words with Friends and take a moment. Stop to look up and look around. Pause and check in with yourself - and spend a moment there. — Maria Shriver

I discovered that our clan included loads of cousins and uncles and aunts and animals of every shape. I was taught that chaos and competition were family values. And I learned that we all loved the sea. Somehow, the sea was about us-our past, our exuberance, our frailty, our longing. — Timothy Shriver

It wasn't until the 1920s that a bare majority of children grew up in families where the father's labor purchased the family's provisions, while their mother did unpaid child care, elder care, and housework.

The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this family form, but it roared back in the 1950s, when the percentage of wives and mothers who were supported entirely by their husbands' wages reached a high that has never been equaled, before or since. — Stephanie Coontz

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 liked that Larry King didn't know who Minerva was. — Maria Shriver

Don't wait until you are perfect to change the world. — Maria Shriver

Pausing allows you to take a beat to take a breath in your life. As everybody else is rushing around like a lunatic out there, I dare you to do the opposite. — Maria Shriver

This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life. — Lionel Shriver

For the living, death is thievery. — Lionel Shriver

No matter who you are, what you've accomplished, what your financial situation is - when you're dealing with a parent with Alzheimer's, you yourself feel helpless. The parent can't work, can't live alone, and is totally dependent, like a toddler. As the disease unfolds, you don't know what to expect. — Maria Shriver

I had had a father whose shoes I could never fill, against whom I would never measure up; yet, I felt no pressure do so. — Mark Shriver

Art is fundamental, unique to each of us ... Even in difficult economic times - especially in difficult economic times, the arts are essential. — Maria Shriver

Racism cannot be cured solely by attacking some of the results it produces, like discrimination in housing or in education. — Sargent Shriver

The most important thing we can tell young people is not to be an imitation of somebody else. That their life is special. They are the creator of their life and their way and find something that they enjoy doing that doesn't even feel like work. It feels like a passion. And then just by doing that and bringing that to the world, they become architects of change. — Maria Shriver

Nothing is interesting if you are not interested. — Lionel Shriver

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

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

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

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

I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray. — Lionel Shriver

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse ... We are meant to be hungry. — Lionel Shriver

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

Any idealist who tries to join the Peace Corps must realize he is not going to change the world overnight. — Sargent Shriver

Do it well, finish it properly,
and move on. — Eunice Kennedy Shriver

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

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

I don't believe in gutter politics. I don't believe in gutter journalism. — Maria Shriver

Perfectionism doesn't make you feel perfect. It makes you feel inadequate. — Maria Shriver

Because let's talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. — Lionel Shriver

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

I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts. — 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

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport. — Lionel Shriver

So when I said I'd miss him, I meant I would miss what we had not experienced, and I don't know what that's called: nostalgia for what didn't happen. — 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

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

Shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor and less about your own. — Sargent Shriver

And there's an ownership to destruction, an intimacy: an appropriation. — 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

A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury. — Lionel Shriver

We all obsess about what we are doing and accomplishing. What if we let it go and simply made the way we live our lives our accomplishment? — Maria Shriver

I like cookies, any cookie you put in front of me - animal cookies, sugar cookies, anything crunchy. — Maria 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

Well they do have drug testing at all the majors and there will be a lot of speculation about what in the world is wrong with Serena Williams and we will find out as much as we can. — Pam Shriver

I'm trying to get away from roles. I used to identify myself strictly in terms of my role, but when your roles fall away, part of you falls with them. — Maria Shriver

I believe strongly in the Constitutional principle of separating church and state. Our founders were right in fearing that religious freedom would be threatened in the long run by a departure from governmental neutrality in spiritual matters. — Sargent Shriver

And because when you die, the world dies, too, at least for you, they assume the world will die for everybody. It's a failure of imagination, in a way - an inability to conceive of the universe without you in it. That's why old people get apocalyptic: they're facing apocalypse, and that part, the private apocalypse, is real. So the closer their personal oblivion gets, the more certain geriatrics project impending doom on their surroundings. Also, there's almost a spitefulness, sometimes. I swear, for some of these bilious Chicken Littles, imminent Armageddon isn't a fear but a fantasy. Like they want the entire planet to implode into a giant black hole. Because if they can't have their martinis on the porch anymore then nobody else should get to sip one, either. — Lionel Shriver

Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks. — Lionel Shriver

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

One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I've even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time. — Maria 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

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

So many people don't know who's on the State Seal and they don't know, not just in California but the United States of America, things they look at every day and they say, 'Wow! I didn't know that.' — Maria Shriver

Does politics have to be injected into everything? — Sargent Shriver

If a young person has any idealism at all, it's strongest about the time he finishes college. — Sargent Shriver

That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable. — Lionel Shriver

Why would affluence make him mad?"
"Maybe he's mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it's very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do. — Lionel Shriver

What we heard loud and clear is that the Battle Between the Sexes is over. It was a draw. Now we're engaged in Negotiation Between the Sexes. — Maria Shriver

Was our life together that unbearable? — Lionel Shriver

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

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

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life. — Lionel Shriver

Time itself makes all things rare. — 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

The love and laughter are what you need most in your life. They'll fill out all the potholes in the road. — Maria Shriver

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

(Note curtailment. Not conclusion.) 7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.) 8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.) 9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew - every woman, too, which is depressing - would — Lionel Shriver

Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. — Lionel Shriver

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

There's something nihilistic about not having children — Lionel Shriver

Apparently 26 years ago, Arnold gave an interview to Oui magazine about his sex life. The good news is that Arnold is married to Maria Shriver and now that he's had a sex scandal, the Kennedy family has finally accepted him. — Jay Leno

The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one. — Lionel Shriver

Discomfort begets discomfort in others. — Lionel Shriver

Creating the Minerva Awards. I really have enjoyed that. I have to say that I moaned and groaned about this job but the way I have it now, I enjoy everything about it. I enjoy giving people service opportunities. — Maria Shriver

Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it's not as pretty. — 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

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself. — Lionel Shriver

I long ago gave up defending humanity. It's beyond me on most days to defend myself. — Lionel Shriver

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

I don't think the Gallup Poll technique is going to be very helpful in determining the goals of our educational system. — Sargent Shriver

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

The big thing is that if you don't try something, you'll always wonder. What could that have been like? What if ... ? — Maria Shriver

Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you, when they didn't? — Lionel Shriver

The energy it sapped from him, not being able to protect her. You wouldn't think that something you couldn't do and were not doing would take any energy, but it did. — 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

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity. — Lionel Shriver

The existence of other people is essentially awkward. — Lionel Shriver

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

It's the most rewarding thing to be a civil servant. — Sargent Shriver

Incredibly, the self-starved never appear capable of taking any pleasure in the very vessel for which they've sacrificed. — Lionel Shriver

What's to rationalize? You mean you shouldn't pray if you haven't got your s
t together? This is another fairly common misconception of faith, which is that people who go to church, or people who pray, or people who talk about their religion must be, somehow more pious or ethically rigorous or have more morally cleansed lifestyle. The high correlation is supposed to be between faith and your search, the depth of your search, your willingness to try, your willingness to admit error, your hope and belief in the ultimate meaning and value of that search.' - Timothy Shriver — J. Randy Taraborrelli

Language is alive, and you can't put it in the freezer. But — Lionel Shriver