Lionel Shriver > Quotes

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, Checker and the Derailleurs

“...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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“There is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role--hero, heroine, or villain.... Unlike the slight implications of quotidian dilemmas that confront the average citizen in other areas of life ... the stakes in this realm could not be higher. For chances are that at some point along the line you will hold in your hands another person's heart. There is no greater responsibility on the planet. However you contend with this fragile organ, which pounds or seizes in accordance with your caprice, will take your full measure.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

“It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.”
― Lionel Shriver, Checker and the Derailleurs

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“It's queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them”
― Lionel Shriver

“The existence of other people is essentially awkward.”
― Lionel Shriver, Checker and the Derailleurs

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

“Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“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. ...”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. 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 me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.”
― Lionel Shriver

“Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific.

By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“I have never in all my life considered you other people.”
― Lionel Shriver, So Much for That

“It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it - the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

“The good life doesn't knock on the door.
Joy is a job.”
― Lionel Shriver

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“...never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.”
― Lionel Shriver

“But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“...I long ago gave up defending humanity. It's beyond me on most days to defend myself.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.

You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“My own apathy is bone chilling.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Time itself made all things rare.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if 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 kid's company isn't more important.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:

1. Hassle.
2. Less time just the two of us. (Try no time just the two of us.)
3. Other people. (PTA meetings. Ballet teachers. The kid's insufferable friends and their insufferable parents.)
4. Turing into a cow. (I was slight, and preferred to stay that way. My sister-in-law had developed bulging varicose veins in her legs during pregnancy that never retreated, and the prospect of calves branched in blue tree roots mortified me more than I could say. So I didn't say. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.)
5. Unnatural altruism: being forced to make decisions in accordance with what was best for someone else. (I'm a pig.)
6. Curtailment of my traveling. (Note curtailment. Not conclusion.)
7. Dementing boredom. (I found small children brutally dull. I did, even at the outset, admit this to myself.)
8. Worthless social life. (I had never had a decent conversation with a friend's five-year-old in the room.)
9. Social demotion. (I was a respected entrepreneur. Once I had a toddler in tow, every man I knew--every woman, too, which is depressing--would take me less seriously.)
10. Paying the piper. (Parenthood repays a debt. But who wants to pay a debt she can escape? Apparently, the childless get away with something sneaky. Besides, what good is repaying a debt to the wrong party? Only the most warped mother would feel rewarded for her trouble by the fact that at last her daughter's life is hideous, too.)”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“...some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“In Kevin's book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin