Quotes from Lionel Shriver

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

Whenever I see fat people, they're eating," I ruminated safely out of the diner's earshot. "Don't give me this it's glands or genes or a slow metabolism rubbish. It's food. They're fat because they eat the wrong food, too much of it, and all the time.

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.

violence is anything an airplane can do to a cloud

Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo - charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.

You can only subject people who have a conscience to anguish . You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good

Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd -- slavery, incest, a suicide -- I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I've learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. I'd readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away.

Infants have great intuition, because intuition's about all they've got.

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

my mother sees chaos biting at her doorstep, while the rest of us inhabit a fabricated playscape whose benevolence is a collective delusion.

Time hangs off me like molting skin.

Great American Novel" = "doorstop of a book, usually pretentious, written by a man.

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

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".

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least -Erma Bombeck

This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen.

For the living, death is thievery.

The word love was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupcons of resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people whom you cared for in your life.

In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations—with not only suffering, but defeat.   Eva

I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn't there. The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It's under the spatula, it's slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee -

There's something nihilistic about not having children

They had no comprehension of why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn't pretty.

Between ourselves, I've started to worry that in some backhanded way I've become attached to the disfigurement of my own life.

In fact, because the unself-aware—which includes basically everybody—are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless.