Lionel Shriver Quotes

I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.

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.

The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.

Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat

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

I have never in all my life considered you other people.

...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

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

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

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.

A boy is a dangerous animal.

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

it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

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

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

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

When Mexico enjoys an economic boom while the U.S. is in dire fiscal straights, it seemed perfectly credible that Mexico would not roll out the welcome mat for unemployed Americans.

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.

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

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 put you off the activity altogether.

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

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort, ' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.

Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. H

He wasn't mad, he was sad.

Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]

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

I glory in the emotionally commonplace

For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis -- I don't care!""Huh, " I considered. "I guess I don't either"."Most people don't! All they care about, " he added grimly, "is being right".

You restored me to the concept of home.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303

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

...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.

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.

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.

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

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.