Quotes from Lionel Shriver

For men, incompetence was a gambit: I'm terrible at this; you do it .

How in the face of an end game there was virtually no limit to what did not matter.

When Harriet was growing up, women were trying to immolate gender stereotypes. These days, you preserved the stereotype, the better not to correspond to it.

For westerners to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired is biologically perverse.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. 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.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.

People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.

How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.

It's always the mother's fault, ain't it?" she said softly, collecting her coat. "That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don't teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. ...

But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.