Lionel Shriver Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it.

Lionel Shriver
It is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

Lionel Shriver
Some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.

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
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
You were ambitious - for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously.

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
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
It's always the mother's fault, ain't it?" she said softly, collecting her coat. "That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don't teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean....

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

Lionel Shriver
Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

Lionel Shriver
History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had every dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted.

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

Lionel Shriver
Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them.

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

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
For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.

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

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
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.

Lionel Shriver
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
Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.

Lionel Shriver
Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.

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

Lionel 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
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.

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

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

Lionel Shriver