Quotes from Lionel Shriver

At some point there was no almost.

Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain—which

The concept of duty was foreign to her, and it was only the people who acknowledged duty, and who had regard for duty, who got saddled with

Nothing is interesting of you're not interested. In vain, I had been waiting for Kevin to price out, to demonstrate as I stood arms folded that he was worthy of my ardor. That was too much to demand of a little boy, who would only be as lovable to me as I allowed him to be. It was past time that I at least met Kevin halfway.

He appeared to believe that because the university owed him his salary, it would ipso facto pay his salary, in a confusion of should and will that bordered on dyslexic.

I do not run the federal mint. If they've decided to save on the costs of production, good for them. In an era of belt-tightening, it makes no sense to lavish resources on a mere medium of exchange, which has no value in and of itself but only represents value.

If we've learnt anything in our practice of medicine," Kay whispered, "it's that there may be a limit to how healthy and happy a person can get, but there's no limit to suffering. So they can always make our lives worse.

Sometimes I feel it right under my ribs. In my throat. Under my breastbone. It moves around. Sometimes it lodges in my lower back, and I slump in my chair. It's an ache. It feels a little bit like having a mobile tumor or blood clot or kidney stone.

You always imagine you'll savor these icon-cum-nemeses' undoing. You're always wrong.

Obsequiousness was a quality that you bought. Fraudulence merely made the fawning seem more expensive.

Economics doesn't reward nice. It rewards smart.

It was never possible to do something back to someone that would undo what he had done to you.

Your honeybunch may not be able to make you feel all warm and gooey inside anymore," Deacon said. "But the ability to fuck you up, well--it's the last magic power to go.

Nollie's having plotted their course with her fleX GPS turned out to be unnecessary. The directions all the way to the Nevada border at Wendover, Utah, came down to: "cross George Washington Bridge, then turn right.

Hoarding remained a synonym beloved of bureaucrats for retaining your own assets.

She herself was only sixty, though hers was the first generation to append "only" to such a sobering milestone.

Shep's plight clearly illustrated that there was no point to anything and there was no relationship between virtue and reward and there never had been.

She had joined the loamy, misshapen tubers on the living room sofa.

as self-satisfaction, and their contentment came across as exclusionary.

Then the same painless generosity spread to everything in a giddy hurtling rush, like that little threshold you cross when cleaning out closets, and suddenly, instead of agonizing over every heel-worn but still wearable pair of boots, parting with all the junk you'll never use anyway is no longer a sacrifice but a joy.

rills ran deeper—so that if you could compare them to ice cream, it was more to the sort so hard that you couldn't ram a spoon into the carton.

We can be world-beaters, and run whole companies, and then claim to be traumatized by a hand on our knee when helplessness is politically useful.

While crude survival from one day to the next might be every human's ultimate animal goal, for generations the Mandible family had managed to dress up the project as considerably more exalted.

Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it's worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it.