Quotes from Lionel Shriver

You were ambitious - for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.

He didn't like to be seen needing it - as if hunger were a sign of weakness.

My own apathy is bone chilling.

Beware of what "everybody says".

I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk.

Time itself made all things rare.

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.

Why would affluence make him mad?" "Maybe he's mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it's very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .

We white folks cling to such an abiding sense of entitlement that when things go amiss, we cannot let go of this tortuously sunny, idiotically cheerful doppelganger of a world that we deserve in which life is swell.

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.We want to be able to tell ourselves what good parents we are, that we're doing our best.

You restored me to the concept of home.

Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison. "Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive.

I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.

I have never in all my life considered you other people.