Lionel Shriver Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Lionel Shriver on Wise Famous Quotes.
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you'd think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it.
I wondered why people ever tried to accomplish anything when attainment of every sort was inbuilt with the forlorn 'Well so
what's next?
what's next?
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.
Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.
Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.
So when I said I'd miss him, I meant I would miss what we had not experienced, and I don't know what that's called: nostalgia for what didn't happen.
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.
In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations - with not only suffering, but defeat. Eva
Between ourselves, I've started to worry that in some backhanded way I've become attached to the disfigurement of my own life.
There is something implicitly uninteresting about the look of a person who will tell you whatever you want to know.
Some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.
Incredibly, the self-starved never appear capable of taking any pleasure in the very vessel for which they've sacrificed.
Just cause you get used to something doesn't mean you like it." He added, snapping the magenta, "You're used to me.
It's queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them
Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket.
In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.
They had no comprehension of why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn't pretty.
Trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.
my mother sees chaos biting at her doorstep, while the rest of us inhabit a fabricated playscape whose benevolence is a collective delusion.
Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt.
The liberation of adulthood as we'd conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed we became our own tyrants.
Like most disguises, the cover-up was worse than honest flaw, a lesson I had yet to register on my own account.
For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul.
I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you feel safe.
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.