Quotes from Lionel Shriver

my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.

So much lying in marriage is merely a matter of keeping quiet.

I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier.

Real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness

Fear is an isometric exercise

And there's an ownership to destruction, an intimacy: an appropriation.

there is something implicitly uninteresting about the look of a person who will tell you whatever you want to know.

One of us could always get pancreatic cancer," you said pleasantly.

After all, she had announced at our introduction in September that she "simply loves children," Miss Fabricant, with a blunt snub of a nose like a Charlotte potato and hips like Idahos, the infeasible assertion seems to decode, "I want to get married.

To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.

Over the years I observed Kevin watching decapitations, disembowelments, dismemberments, flayings, impalements, deoculations, and crucifixions, and I never saw him flinch. Because he'd mastered the trick. If you decline to identify, slice-and-dice is no more discomforting than watching your mother prepare beef stroganoff.

What strikes me as people in diners rail at each other at the counter when before they ate in silence is not how imperiled they feel, but how safe. Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment. But

This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling mad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.

and Germans are obsessed with shit.

This was food without you. Our loft, rich with the international booty of baskets and carvings, took on the tacky, cluttered aspect of an import outlet: This was our home without you. Objects had never seemed so inert, so pugnaciously incompensatory. Your remnants mocked me: the jump rope limp on its hook; the dirty socks, stiff, caricatured deflations of your size eleven feet.

in art your limitations are also your strengths. What you're not good at, what you can't think of, even the mistakes you make all contribute to your personal style. To have no such constraints is to be shapeless, she said, and to have no voice. This dictum helped explain Kay's growing identity crisis.

I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you feel safe.

Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing already the less you listened and the less you learned.

Note curtailment. Not conclusion.) 7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.) 8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.) 9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew—every woman, too, which is depressing—would

No tenemos mucho en común, pero, en general, disfruto con su compañía, la mera yuxtaposición de cuerpos calientes proporciona el más profundo de los consuelos animales.

No había, por mi parte, falta de cariño ni dureza de corazón. Cuando escrutas tus sentimientos con un exceso de obsesiva atención, llega un momento en que se te escapan.

indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.

You don't understand," I said, adding the most difficult claim of fealty I'd ever made, "That's my son.

A obstinação pura e simples é mais durável que a coragem, embora não seja tão