Quotes from Lionel Shriver

Jayne was left an only child after her younger sister committed suicide in adolescence (a tragedy, yes, but one whose psychic statute of limitations might have run out by now - not that you'd get his wife to relinquish the trauma , which seemed to confer the special-protection status of landmark architecture.

To truly pull off proper apathy about the stuff (money) would require so much energy, such contrived ideological zealotry, that the indifference would amount to a kind of caring.

But I've never met anybody whose life has taken a sudden turn for the worse who thought a reversal of fortune was just what they had coming to them.

This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.

Jarred had started out a radical environmentalist, a position only ninety degrees from survivalist. With one small last adjustment in the same direction, he transformed to libertarian gun nut.

There's something especially terrible about being told over and over that you have the most wonderful life on earth and it doesn't get any better and it's still shit.

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. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body.

That was one thing you could say for a life of complications: it made for good stories, though someone had always suffered for them.

the only good things about getting old was mutual permission to be imperfect.

I backed off. Ever since obesity had become a social issue on top of a personal one, big people must have encountered the conviction that what they ate was everyone else's business. In truth that chocolate bar did feel intensely like my business, but only because he was my brother. Whenever he ate rich or sweet things around me I got agitated, no less so than if he'd carved himself with a razor blade in plain view.

how curious it was that couples with the largest families were so frequently the very people least capable of supporting them

The eerie disposition between player and piano put me in mind of Schroeder, banging out Beethoven on a toy.

Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. They're not about the future at all. The future is just the ultimate monster in the closet, the great unknown.

Everything was dusty, and the fridge hadn't been cleaned for months. Inside, the smoked salmon was swimming, the caviar had hatched, and the liqueur-filled dark chocolates had turned fright-white.

What do you make of the proposition that the definition of a truly free society is a place where you can still get away with something?

Money is worth what people feel it's worth. . . . Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper.

Cheating,' Nollie agreed, 'is restorative. It maintains your dignity. Breaking a rule a day keeps the doctor away far better than a fucking apple.

at the University of Ottawa in Canada, a yoga teacher was shamed into suspending her class, "because yoga originally comes from India." She offered to retitle the course "Mindful Stretching.

He's getting old enough to appreciate, too, that one of the differences between a "perp," as they say in cop shows, and your average newspaper reader is that onlookers are allowed the luxury of getting "fucking tired of the same fucking story" and are free to move on. Culprits are stuck in what must be a tyrannical rehearsal of the same old tale.

Money is emotional," Lowell pronounced. "Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it's worth.

did not love running. Here's a pointer for you: no one does. They pretend to, but they're lying. The only good part is having run.

I was never shy. I was waiting to have something to say.

The very best thing about getting old was basking in this great big not-giving-a-shit.

At last she got it: concept is incidental; execution is all.