Quotes from Lionel Shriver

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. Evidence to the contrary found nowhere to lodge, like a book on chaos theory in a library that didn't have a physics section.

expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.

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.

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.

Because when you get sick, I think that's the hardest part: living in a separate universe from everyone else, like having been exiled to a foreign country.

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.

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.

I'd get this, I luuuuuuuv you, buddy! stuff, and I'd just look at him like, Who are you talking to, guy? What does that mean, your dad 'loves' you and hasn't a [bleep]ing clue who you are? What's he love then? Some kid in Happy Days. Not me.

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.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

f]or most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon.

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.

I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to.

Remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be obscurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeers. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around--well, it just didn't seem that different.

Only in retrospect do I appreciate that this "doing your bit" is a deadly misapprehension of the nature of familial ties. Better understanding them now, I find blood relationships rather frightening. What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you.

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.

So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am.

But too strictly observed, most sacraments grow hollow.

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.

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.

Economics is closer to religion than science.

Still, I may have been glad to scratch the dry surface of our day-to-day peaceableness the way Violetta had clawed the sere crust on her limbs, anything to get something bright and liquid flowing again, out in the open and slippery between our fingers.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him, because broken machines can be fixed.

Presenting emotions as facts-which they are-affords a fragile defense.