Lionel Shriver Quotes

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.

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.

My own apathy is bone chilling.

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

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.

But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

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

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.

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.

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

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

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

So many stories are determined before they start.

Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.

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

Time itself made all things rare.

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

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

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.

When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear.

For the living, death is thievery.

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

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

The secret is that there is no secret.

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

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

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

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

The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

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

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

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

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.

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.

You can't be stylish and petty at the same time.

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

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

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

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

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

People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.

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

It was important to me to put together a future history that would scan, and serve as the backdrop to the domestic story. Economics is really what drives the plot.

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

But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.

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.

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

Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.

Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

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