Lionel Shriver Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

Lionel Shriver
It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

Lionel Shriver
The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

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

Lionel Shriver
Hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

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

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

Lionel Shriver