We Need to Talk About Kevin Quotes

“...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

“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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Okay, it's like this. You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news, since guess what. Nothing is really happening. You read the paper, or if you're into that sort of thing you read a book, which is just the same as watching only even more boring. You watch TV all night, or maybe you go out so you can watch a movie, and maybe you'll get a phone call so you can tell your friends what you've been watching. And you know, it's got so bad that I've started to notice, the people on TV? Inside the TV? Half the time they're watching TV. Or if you've got some romance in a movie? What to they do but go to a movie? All those people, Marlin," he invited the interviewer in with a nod. "What are they watching?"

After an awkward silence, Marlin filled in, "You tell us, Kevin."

"People like me.”
― 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

“Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.”
― 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

“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

“I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.”
― 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

“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

“How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.”
― 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

“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

“I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“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

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

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

“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