We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

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

After all, 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.

My own apathy is bone chilling.

How lucky we are, when we’re spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!

That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn’t necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare.

This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.

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.

But if I extracted one lesson from my tenth birthday party, it was that expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.

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.”

The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies.

And there’s a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything.

But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.

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

But many, perhaps most siblings share a private universe tropical with benevolence, betrayal, vendetta, reconciliation, and the use and abuse of power of which their parents know practically nothing.

I cannot say whether we are less ourselves when we are sick, or more.

I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn’t submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction—who couldn’t serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did—without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families.

we’d been assured that it wouldn’t be painful, though she might experience “discomfort,” a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn’t yours.

Kids have a well-tuned radar to detect the difference between an adult who’s interested and an adult who’s keen to seem interested.