Lionel Shriver Quotes

Other people savor the symmetry of opposites. ~ Lionel Shriver

I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn't there. The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It's under the spatula, it's slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee - ~ Lionel Shriver

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

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations - with not only suffering, but defeat. Eva ~ Lionel Shriver

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? ~ Lionel Shriver

Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. ~ Lionel Shriver

They had no comprehension of why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn't pretty. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

Someone had to insert a note of peevishness into this hellishly halcyon Keep Calm and Carry On. Generating some reputable resentment, giving voice to the free-floating outrage that imbued their environs like smoke from a burnt dinner - it was a job to do, as Avery's tireless goodwill was a job. With corresponding self-sacrifice, he'd taken on the less glamorous task of reminding the rest that this sucked, it all sucked, it wasn't fair! ~ 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

I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and extremely specific. ~ 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

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

Time itself makes all things rare. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I've had my whole life that at any given time there's something I'm forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I'm supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation - I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it. When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I'd wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There'd be nothing I had to do. Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I've hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I've done my homework. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

The existence of other people is essentially awkward. ~ Lionel Shriver

It wasn't that eating was so great
it wasn't
but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything that was decidedly less than okay. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

Sometimes things end worse for one side than the other. These 'injured parties' always seem to see themselves as victims of a moral outrage. They never feel simply rejected, but also abused. I've known many women who were great believers in the curative powers of indignation. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

The good life doesn't knock on the door.
Joy is a job. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

Their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice – nice, nice, nice.

I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. […] These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.

You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you'd found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

You know that euphemism, she's expecting? It's apt. The birth of a baby, so long as it's healthy, is something to look forward to. It's a good thing, a big, good, huge event. And from thereon in, every good things, too," I added hurriedly, "but also, you know, first steps, first dates, first places in sack races. Kids, they graduate, they marry, they have kids themselves- in a way, you get to do everything twice. Even if our kid had problems," I supposed idiotically, "at least they wouldn't be our same old problems ... " (22) ~ Lionel Shriver

The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there's more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ 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

His weight makes him a social pariah. It reduces the likelihood he'll remarry. It has grave implications for his health. But it isn't evil. Just like all that exercise of yours has nothing to do with being good. I know you think it does. It makes you feel good, and feel good about yourself, and feel superior to people who slob around all day. But it's mostly a waste of time that doesn't do anything for anybody else but you. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

I glory in the emotionally commonplace ~ Lionel Shriver

Frankly, the reason why lawyers were compensated so lavishly was that they were paid to attend to the most stultifying aspects of modern life. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

I long ago gave up defending humanity. It's beyond me on most days to defend myself. ~ Lionel Shriver

So much lying in marriage is merely a matter of keeping quiet. ~ Lionel Shriver

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 ~ Lionel Shriver

Because let's talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

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 ~ Lionel Shriver

I believe the impulse to write comes out of a failure to communicate by any other means. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

Clingy. It's an ugly word, isn't it, that describes the honey of the heart as a sticky, pestersome substance that won't brush off. And to whatever degree clinginess is not simply a mean appellation for the most precious thing on earth, it involves an unacceptably incessant demand for attention, approbation, ardor in return. ~ Lionel Shriver

Never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year. ~ 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

This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. ~ 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

A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress. For that matter, that is the nature of resentment, the objection we cannot express. It is silence more than the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic, like poisons the body won't pee away. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

For the living, death is thievery. ~ Lionel Shriver

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? ~ Lionel Shriver

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

Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement. ~ Lionel Shriver

With relish, Kevin explained the boy's claim to fame: An elderly couple in an adjacent apartment had complained about how loudly he played his CDs of the Monkees at three in the morning. The next weekend, the couple's daughter discovered her parents in their bed, slit from crotch to throat. "That's appalling," I said. "I can't believe anyone still listens to the Monkees. ~ Lionel Shriver

Time itself made all things rare. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

Between ourselves, I've started to worry that in some backhanded way I've become attached to the disfigurement of my own life. ~ Lionel Shriver

For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

Nothing is interesting if you are not interested. ~ Lionel Shriver

That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting. ~ Lionel Shriver

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether. ~ Lionel Shriver

You restored me to the concept of home. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

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

It's as if your money, by conceit inexhaustible, isn't real, so your generosity isn't real, either. ~ Lionel Shriver

What did I expect, that you would wrap my rib cage with those enormous hands in which horses must be measured, lifting me overhead with the stern reproach that is every Western woman's sly delight, "You're too thin"? ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

my mother sees chaos biting at her doorstep, while the rest of us inhabit a fabricated playscape whose benevolence is a collective delusion. ~ Lionel Shriver

And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

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

Fear is an isometric exercise ~ Lionel Shriver

Discomfort begets discomfort in others. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

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 ~ Lionel Shriver

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

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

Having buck teeth in junior high," she rounded up unsteadily, "must
be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb
shock. It's like, what's going on? Why doesn't anyone smile at me at
checkout anymore? But it won't be a shock for me. It'll be, oh that. That
again. Teeth. ~ 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

Dr. Rhinestein did not test for malice, for spiteful indifference, or for congenital meanness. If they could, I wonder how many fish we might throw back. ~ Lionel Shriver

I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction
who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did
without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: "Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?" And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat! ~ 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

The secret is that there is no secret. ~ Lionel Shriver

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

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile. ~ Lionel Shriver

Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it - the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight. ~ Lionel Shriver

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. ~ Lionel Shriver

History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had ever 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