Lionel Shriver Quotes

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

Lionel Shriver

Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison."Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive.

Lionel Shriver

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

Lionel Shriver

The secret is that there is no secret.

Lionel 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

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

Lionel Shriver

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

Lionel Shriver

Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan's life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.

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

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in anaccumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimismwere more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It washard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep thepast itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it.

Lionel Shriver

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

Lionel Shriver

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

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

How lucky we are, when we are spared what we think we want!

Lionel Shriver

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

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

...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

We all do it (or I used to-yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn't customary to say, "Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I'm going to go masturbate.

Lionel Shriver

I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

Lionel Shriver

A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.

Lionel Shriver

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

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

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

You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.

Lionel Shriver

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303

Lionel Shriver

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

Lionel Shriver

You restored me to the concept of home.

Lionel Shriver

I still get plenty anxious. The weird thing, and the unpleasant surprise for me, of proceeding well into the middle, perhaps even post-prime of my career is that writing books has not got any easier. And that doesn't seem fair. I mean, I've been doing it so surely I should be getting better at it, at least a little bit blasé... And it seems to be working absolutely the opposite. This book [Big Brother] I had no confidence in the entirety of its composition, and I only decided I liked it when I finished the very final draft. This means I'm in a state of semi-misery for a long time. And I can't blithely seem either that's some little game I'm playing with myself because, you know, you can easily come along and you don't like what's you're writing for good reason. Right? So, yeah, it's very anxious making, I don't think it's so much the becoming a little more successful, I think it's becoming slightly more aware of how much has already been written, and just becoming less self-impressed as the years go by. More impressed with some people who are better than I am, but... It doesn't wow me that I can write a sentence any more. It has to be a really good sentence. And... I think that's what potentially leads to paralysis in late career, is a kind of killing humility.Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, on June 11, 2013

Lionel Shriver

Still, through a complex combination of optimism and longing and bravado, you would round it up. While a cruder name for this process is lying , one could make a case that delusion is a variant of generosity. After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born.Me, I’m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus. At the risk of tautology, I like people only as much as I like them. I lead an emotional life of such arithmetic precision, carried to two or three digits after the decimal, that I am even willing to allow for degrees of agreeableness in my own son. In other words, Franklin: I leave the $17.

Lionel Shriver

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

There is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role--hero, heroine, or villain.... Unlike the slight implications of quotidian dilemmas that confront the average citizen in other areas of life ... the stakes in this realm could not be higher. For chances are that at some point along the line you will hold in your hands another person's heart. There is no greater responsibility on the planet. However you contend with this fragile organ, which pounds or seizes in accordance with your caprice, will take your full measure.

Lionel Shriver

I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important.

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 bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.

Lionel Shriver

I glory in the emotionally commonplace

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

If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.

Lionel Shriver

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

Lionel Shriver

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

Lionel Shriver