Quotes from Lionel Shriver

Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it's not as pretty.

Nothing is interesting if you are not interested.

Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket.

A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship,it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth,which carries on being carelessly true without any help.By contrast, my lie needed as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock : Till death do us part.

hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

Exasperatingly, we're all pretty much restricted to learning what people are like with the permanent confound of our own presence, which is why those chance glimpses of someone you love just walking down the street can seem so precious.

In truth we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. that is what we really wish to keep fom our kids, and it's suppression is the true collusion of adulthood...

He wasn't mad, he was sad.

He was already intuiting that attachment - if only to a squirt gun - made him vulnerable.

Yet in my experience, when left to their own devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.

I wonder if I wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you'. I wonder if just enjoying your kids company isn't more important.

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

I am a bundle of other people's histories, a creature of circumstance.

A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.

He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing.

The energy it sapped from him, not being able to protect her. You wouldn't think that something you couldn't do and were not doing would take any energy, but it did.

He'd been unable to discern whether this frantic bustle of hers was what it claimed to be - an ardent determination to live every remaining day to the fullest - or quite the opposite: an evasion. An equally ardent determination to distract herself, from what only she could know, and thus a complete failure to inhabit her life in the scarcest respect.

Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present.

How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?

Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

Discomfort begets discomfort in others.

You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it's the fault of somebody who's dead.

I long ago gave up defending humanity. It's beyond me on most days to defend myself.