Quotes from 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"?

And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

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.

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.

Maybe it was different for you and Valerie, since you didn't like each other much. But many, perhaps most siblings share a private universe tropical with benevolence, betrayal, vendetta, reconciliation, and the use and abuse of power of which their parents know practically nothing.

Bur Armenians have a talent for sorrow.

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

We agreed that whether we became parents would be 'the single most important decision we would ever make together.' Yet the very momentousness of the decision guaranteed that it never seemed real, and so remained on the level of whimsy. Every time one of us raised the question of parenthood, I felt like a seven-year-old contemplating a Thumbelina that wets iself for Christmas.

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.

Food was a responsibility, a ward she was determined to go by, ... She'd force herself through to the last forkful even to the point of nausea, because she didn't understand that it was there for her and not the other way round.

For all our squinting at the two sexes to blur them into duplicates, few hearts race when passing gaggles of giggling schoolgirls. But any woman who passes a clump of testosterone-drunk punks without picking up the pace, without avoiding the eye contact that might connote challenge or invitation, without sighing inwardly with relief by the following block, is a zoological fool. A boy is a dangerous animal.

It's not that I have no shame. Rather, I'm exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint. It is not an emotion that leads anywhere.

Was our life together that unbearable?

T]he cardboard bookcase of her character had already collapsed under the strain.

The moving parts of the house were all silent, its surfaces smooth. The closet doors had no handles. None of the woodwork had fixtures. Drawers had gentle indents. The kitchen cabinets pushed open and shut with a click. Franklin, the whole house was on Zoloft. You

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

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

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.

I don't understand why doctors don't advise everybody to lay on twenty extra pounds while they've got the chance. I might not advocate outright obesity, but there's a reason for fat - it's a resource.

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

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

We all do it (or I used to-yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn't customary to say, "Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I'm going to go masturbate.

I bask in their heatedness as before a woodstove. My own apathy is bone chilling.

Is it called naiveté when you're naïve in purpose?