We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

Besides, sometimes when you’re watching yourself too hard, scrutinizing your own feelings, they flee, they elude capture. I was self-conscious, and I was trying too hard. I had worked myself up into a kind of emotional paralysis.

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.

I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on

this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive.

I faced a purple churn of insatiable fury while rehearsing to myself with dull incomprehension, I’m supposed to love this.

was a variety of liberty of which I could no longer avail myself without sinking the one tiny island of permanence, of durable meaning and lasting desire, that I had managed to annex in this vast, arbitrary sea of international indifference.

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.”

quite well versed in Portuguese history down to the order of the monarchy and how many Jews were murdered during the Inquisition, and now I was reciting the alphabet. Not the Cyrillic alphabet, nor the Hebrew one, the alphabet

real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.

While to some extent we all shelter one another from the cacophony of horrors in our heads, even these intangible unsaids made me mournful.

To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay.

Children want to be assured that there are other things to do, important things; more important, on occasion, than they are.

though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.