Lionel Shriver Quotes

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

~ Lionel Shriver

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

~ Lionel Shriver

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

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

~ Lionel Shriver

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

~ 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

...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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

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

~ Lionel Shriver

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

~ 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

The secret is that there is no secret.

~ 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

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

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

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

~ Lionel Shriver