Lionel Shriver Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old. ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had every 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 -
“Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison. "Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“So many stories are determined before they start.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“Holocausts do not amaze me. Rapes and child slavery do not amaze me. And Franklin, I know you feel otherwise, but Kevin does not amaze me. I am amazed when I drop a glove in the street and a teenager runs two blocks to return it. I am amazed when a checkout girl flashes me a wide smile with my change, though my own face had been a mask of expedience. Lost wallets posted to their owners, strangers who furnish meticulous directions, neighbors who water each other's houseplants - these things amaze me.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary.”
-- 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 -
“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.”
-- 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 -
“For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.”
-- Lionel Shriver -
“Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu.”
-- Lionel Shriver
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