Quotes from Lionel Shriver

as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.

The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there's more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species.

Just because there are lots of them doesn't mean that the hot apple pies aren't excellent or that it isn't a privilege to live in a time when you can buy them for 99 cents. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare.

Oh, you knew exactly what I meant. 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.

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it.

She loved him, but that wasn't good enough. 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.

like that legendary journey that begins with a single step, I had already embarked upon my first resentment. A petty one, but most resentments are. And one that for its smallness I felt obliged to repress.

Blame confers an awesome power. And it's simplifying, not only to onlookers and victims but to culprits most of all. It imposes order on slag. Blame conveys clear lessons in which others may take comfort: if only she hadn't -- , and by implication makes tragedy avoidable. There may even be a fragile peace to be found in the assumption of total responsibility...

His weight makes him a social pariah. It reduces the likelihood he'll remarry. It has grave implications for his health. But it isn't evil. Just like all that exercise of yours has nothing to do with being good. I know you think it does. It makes you feel good, and feel good about yourself, and feel superior to people who slob around all day. But it's mostly a waste of time that doesn't do anything for anybody else but you.

Frankly, the reason why lawyers were compensated so lavishly was that they were paid to attend to the most stultifying aspects of modern life.

Rarely is the object of your attentions innately dull or compelling. Nothing is interesting if you are not interested.

Il ragazzo è cattivo perché sua mamma è una ubriacona o un rottame. Gli lascia fare quello che vuole. Non gli insegna la differenza tra ciò che è giusto e ciò che è sbagliato. Non è a casa quando torna da scuola. Nessuno dice mai che suo padre è un ubriacone, o che non è a casa quando lui torna da scuola. E nessuno dice che alcuni di questi ragazzi sono solo maledettamente cattivi.

Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me.

unto me a son was born, and I felt nothing.

A well-constructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact, which will as easily make a pyramid as a platform.

The liberation of adulthood as we'd conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed we became our own tyrants.

Woe to those who spare no expense. I should know, since these are travelers who scorn AWAP for holidays in "foreign" countries so comfortable they qualify as near death experiences.

I always prefer socializing at night-it is implicitly more wanton

Orderliness readily slides to conformity over time.

Other people savor the symmetry of opposites.

Complacency has a way of restoring itself of its own accord

Having buck teeth in junior high," she rounded up unsteadily, "must be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb shock. It's like, what's going on? Why doesn't anyone smile at me at checkout anymore? But it won't be a shock for me. It'll be, oh that. That again. Teeth.

I can't imagine that I'm supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense.

I have reflected on the fact that for most of us, there is a hard, impassable barrier between the most imaginatively detailed depravity and its real-life execution.