Quotes from Lionel Shriver

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

I mean when I was a kid, parents called the shots. Now I'm a parent, kids call the shots. So we get fucked coming and going. I can't believe this.

We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.

He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin.

He had learned what all skilled liars register if they're ever to make a career of it: Always appropriate as much of the truth as possible. A wellconstructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact

The very insurmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness, was in the end what attracted me to it.

Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.

And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.

There's no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary.

Then, you were always captivated by self-sacrifice. However admirable, your eagerness to give your life over to another person may have been due in some measure to the fact that when your life was wholly in your lap you didn't know what to do with it. Self-sacrifice was an easy way out.

Thus even tragedy can be accompanied by a trace of relief. The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.

Like most disguises, the cover-up was worse than honest flaw, a lesson I had yet to register on my own account.

In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting.

I see now what they mean by "holding your head high," and I am sometimes surprised by how much interior transformation a ramrod posture can afford. When I stand physically proud, I feel a small measure less mortified.

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon—the smallest of compromises, the little roundings off or slight recastings of one emotion as another that is a tad nicer or more flattering.

Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]

They drummed into you that pain was good, you were supposed to go with it, push into the pain, and only... now... did I contemplate what retarded advice this was.

Time itself makes all things rare.

It was a short session of the simple being-ness that he had long coveted for The Afterlife. What Glynis had called "doing nothing," The smelling and seeing and hearing and small noticings of sheer animal presence in the world surely constituted activity of a sort, perhaps the most important kind. This was a form of companionship that he'd been especially cherishing with Glynis of late: devoid of conversation, but so surprising in its contrast to being by yourself.

the good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.

He's one of those attorneys who think of the law as a game, not a morality play. I'm told that'd the kind you want.

I glory in the emotionally commonplace

I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly 33 by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary.

It was a whole world, his mouth, a whole unsuspected world, and kissing him occasioned the same sense of discovery as sliding a clear drop of plain tap water under a microscope and divining whole schools of fantastic fibrillose creatures, or pointing a telescope at a patch of sky pitch-dark to the naked eye and lo, it is spattered with stars.