Lionel Shriver Quotes

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

In Kevin's book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.

I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you feel safe.

Fear is an isometric exercise

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

Cynics are spoiled romantics. They are always the ones who had the highest expectations at the start. They were once so naïve themselves that they despise naïvety more than any other quality. Alchemists, they turn grief to gold. They take quinine in their tonic, Campari with their soda - bitterness is an acquired taste. Cynics have learned to drink poison and like it. They are resourceful people, though the sad thing is, they know what's happened to them. They remember what they wanted to be when they grew up, and not a single one of them dreamt of becoming a cynic.

How much kinder it would have been, to turn off, like an appliance. The gradual, drawn-out corruption of the body while its host was still trapped inside was a torture of a sort they would have contrived at Guantanamo, or Bergen-Belsen. Every old age was an Edgar Allan Poe story.

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

All these men afraid of bein' crowded, ain't they? They need all this room, they afraid some woman gonna crawl in their head and take over. Well, surprise, surprise. Ain't nobody crawlin' in there 'cept you, honey, and you get older and older and it get stuffy in there. Let me tell you, you afraid of other folks takin' away your elbow room, well, just relax. You born alone, you die alone, and you get any kind of company in between, you one lucky boy. Bein' by yourself ain't no accomplishment. Ain't like being no kind of hero. Ray, see, Ray sho 'nough figures he gettin' away with somethin', understand me? He think he a clever boy, runnin' round with whores, gettin' diseases, drinkin' his heart out till five in the a.m. Lucky Ray, huh? Well, what Raymond Harris gettin' away with is not see his kids grow up, and when he do come back they call him Mr. Harris 'steada Daddy, and they shake his hand 'steada kiss his cheek, and they spit when he turn his back. And I spit, too, though I'll take him in again and love him, 'cause that's what I's here to do. But I spit anyways, 'cause he such a dumb sucker, understand me? 'Less stupid ole Ray Harris die by hisself in some alleyway. Sho, run away. Best way in the world to be nothin'. Risk endin' up croaked by garbage cans, when he could die in my arms?" Leonia put her coffee cup in its saucer, and it rattled softly. "That no way to be the big man, baby. That just be dumb and sad. You got me?

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children's lunch boxes.

Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you'd think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it.

Take me less seriously.) 10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother could feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.) Those, as best I can recall, are the pygmy misgivings I weighed beforehand, and I've tried not to

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

I had created my own Other Woman who happened to be a boy. I'd seen this in-house cuckolding in other families, and it's odd that I'd failed to spot it in ours.

There's no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary.

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

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.

We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats – including sombreros.

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.

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.

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

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

The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.

She had some appreciation for folks with a greed for sensation. Who were determined to "squeeze the orange" and press fresh experience from every day. But that way lay burnout. There were only so many experiences, really- a depressing discovery in itself., and surely you were better off trying to replicate the pleasing ones as often as possible.

At only ten a.m., Edgar found himself already eyeing the Doritos on the counter. One thing he hadn't anticipated about the 'home office' was Snack Syndrome; lately his mental energies divided evenly between his new calling (worrying about money, which substituted neatly for earning it) and not stuffing his face.

Once I was no longer fussing with my coat, he said, "You may be fooling the neighbors and the guards and Jesus and your gaga mother with these goody-goody visits of yours, but you're not fooling me. Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don't be dragging your ass back here on my account." Then he added, "Because I hate you." I

Is there any place you think is better?" asked Shep. "No," Jackson said readily. "Of course not. They're all the same. It's human nature, man. You give anybody the power to take other people's money, as much as they want, you think over time they'll start taking less? Or work more for it, when they can get away with doing practically nothing? Governments are all the same, man. They eat their own countries until there's nothing left. They're cannibals." Carol

Infants have great intuition, because intuition's about all they've got.

We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.

With no interruptions to admire dolly outfits, no tomorrow is a school day, we gorged on fruit and sorbet and splashed immoderate second shots of clear heady framboise, whooping at each others' top-this tales in the orgy of eternal adolescence characteristic of the childless in middle age.

What is cool changes; that there is such a thing as cool is immutable.

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

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.

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. 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. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be no

He was already intuiting that attachment - if only to a squirt gun - made him vulnerable.

They still want credit for being tolerant, without taking the rap for the fact that you only 'tolerate' what you can't stand.

He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin.

Just cause you get used to something doesn't mean you like it." He added, snapping the magenta, "You're used to me.

Great American Novel" = "doorstop of a book, usually pretentious, written by a man.

Bur Armenians have a talent for sorrow.

Was our life together that unbearable?

Couples stray," said Edgar. "Part of the breaking-in process."
"Not breaking in, breaking." Nicola differed sharply. "You can glue people together again. But then your relationship's like any other repaired object, with cracks, blobs of epoxy, a little askew. It's never the same. I can see you haven't a notion what I'm on about, so you'll have to take my word for it."
"Christ, you're a babe in the woods." Edgar stopped slicing tomatoes. "You got it ass-backward. A marriage perched like porcelain on the mantelpiece is doomed. Sooner or later grown-ups treat each other like shit. You gotta be able to kick the thing around, less like china than an old shoe - bam, under the bed, or walk it through some puddles. No love's gonna last it if can't take abuse.

No such thing as larger-than-life, Kellogg. There's only life-size, and any magnification is just other people's bullshit.

I might be more kindly disposed to this ultra-secular notion that whenever bad things happen someone must be held accountable if a curious little halo of blamelessness did not seem to surround those very people who perceive themselves as bordered on every side by agents of wickedness. That is, it seems to be the same folks who are inclined to sue builders who did not perfectly protect them from the depredations of an earthquake who will be the first to claim that their son failed his math test because of attention deficit disorder, and not because he spent the night before at a video arcade instead of studying complex fractions.

I am a bundle of other people's histories, a creature of circumstance.

I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn't initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used.

We agreed that whether we became parents would be 'the single most important decision we would ever make together.' Yet the very momentousness of the decision guaranteed that it never seemed real, and so remained on the level of whimsy. Every time one of us raised the question of parenthood, I felt like a seven-year-old contemplating a Thumbelina that wets iself for Christmas.

I was reminded of the time I got a free upgrade to first class, where I sat right next to Sean Connery. Tongue-tied, I couldn't think of a thing to say besides, "You're Sean Connery," of which presumably he was aware.

The liberation of adulthood as we'd conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed we became our own tyrants.

If Edgar sounded overeager, even rushed, the race was with his own temperament. He placed a premium on savvy. Yet since you could only obtain new information by admitting you didn't know it already, savvy required an apprenticeship as a naive twit. You had to ask crude, obvious questions ... you had to sit still while worldly-wise warhorses ... fired withering glances as if you were born yesterday.
Well, Edgar was born yesterday for the moment, although his tolerance for being treated liked a simpleton was in short supply. He'd needed to rattle off a multitude of stupid questions before he embraced his next incarnation as an insider. The trouble was that savvy coated your brain in plastic like a driver's license: nothing more could get in. Hence the point at which you decided you knew everything was exactly the point at which you became an ignorant dipshit.

Is it called naiveté when you're naïve in purpose?

Nothing is interesting if you are not interested.

But after I'd survived for so long on the scraps from my own emotional table, you spoiled me with a daily banquet of complicitous what-an-asshole looks at parties, surprise bouquets for no occasion, and fridge-magnet notes that always signed off XXXX, Franklin.

Everything people do that doesn't work has to be somebody else's fault. Next time you know, geezers'll be suing the government for getting old and kids'll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?

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

Now, over the years I've been forced to conclude that most celebrations don't work. The more carefully planned a signal occasion, the more likely it will trickle by on a pale tide of dilute well-meaningness. Christmases, birthdays, award ceremonies, and weddings are swallowed by planning and preparation on the one side and cleaning up on the other, and almost never seem to have actually happened.

We white folks cling to such an abiding sense of entitlement that when things go amiss, we cannot let go of this tortuously sunny, idiotically cheerful doppelganger of a world that we deserve in which life is swell.

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.

...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.

To be ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lowercase gods of our private devising. We are concerned with leading less a good life than the good life. In contrast to our predecessors, we seldom ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask ourselves if we are happy. We shun self-sacrifice and duty as the soft spots of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and we're not especially bothered by what happens once we're dead. As we age - oh, so reluctantly! - we are apt to look back on our pasts and question not did I serve family, God and country, but did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat? We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

If that package sounds like one big moral step backward, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from sixties catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upsides. There has to be some value in living for today, since at any given time today is all you've got. We justly cherish characters c

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.

You were nice to me for almost ten years," he said gruffly. "Why should that count for nothing just because it's not going to be eleven?

Tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. It was as if some folks got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people's outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger's ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through this man's fresh divorce and this woman's throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody's hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste.

We need to recognise that slowing population growth is one of the most cost-effective and reliable ways of easing pressure on our environment and securing a sustainable future for us all

Just because there are lots of them doesn't mean that it isn't a privilege to live in a time when you can buy them for 99¢. (about Mcdonalds' apple pies)

He wasn't mad, he was sad.

Yet in my experience, when left to their own devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.

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.

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.

Over the years I observed Kevin watching decapitations, disembowelments, dismemberments, flayings, impalements, deoculations, and crucifixions, and I never saw him flinch. Because he'd mastered the trick. If you decline to identify, slice-and-dice is no more discomforting than watching your mother prepare beef stroganoff.

Time itself made all things rare.

No, this mother purled about her duties like a bubbling brook, and any number of stones hurled at her eddies sank with a harmless rattle to her bed.

I was disquieted to realize that he had ceased to call me anything at all. That seemed impossible, but your children generally use your name when they want something, if only attention, and Kevin was loath to beseech me for so much as a turned head.

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

The gap between most people's capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean.

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

One of the things I learned with Charles," said Gray carefully, "was that finding someone like you does not necessarily mean that either of you should be that way.

I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive.

Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.

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.

Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.

Whenever I see fat people, they're eating," I ruminated safely out of the diner's earshot. "Don't give me this it's glands or genes or a slow metabolism rubbish. It's food. They're fat because they eat the wrong food, too much of it, and all the time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The irony is, though your parents always deplored his absence of Protestant industry, those two have more in common with Kevin than anyone I know. If they don't know what life is for, what to do with it, Kevin doesn't, either; interestingly, both your parents and your firstborn abhor leisure time. Your son always attacked this antipathy head-on, which involves a certain bravery if you think about it; he was never one to deceive himself that, by merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use. Oh, no
you'll remember he would sit by the hour stewing and glowering and doing nothing but reviling every second of every minute of his Saturday afternoon.

I always prefer socializing at night-it is implicitly more wanton

At some point there was no almost.

[T]he cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain.

I'm unsure why one trifling incident this afternoon has moved me to write to you. But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards. Were you still installed in my kitchen, slathering crunchy peanut butter on Branola though it was almost time for dinner, I'd no sooner have put down the bags, one leaking a clear vicious drool, than this little story would come tumbling out, even before I chided that we're having pasta tonight so would you please not eat that whole sandwich.

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.

They drummed into you that pain was good, you were supposed to go with it, push into the pain, and only ... now ... did I contemplate what retarded advice this was.

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

After all, she had announced at our introduction in September that she "simply loves children," Miss Fabricant, with a blunt snub of a nose like a Charlotte potato and hips like Idahos, the infeasible assertion seems to decode, "I want to get married.

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

I'm a journalist, and journalists need news. Deprive them of it, and they go a bit barking. Deprive them of news long enough, and they'll make their own - much the way the starving will eventually turn to cannibalism.