We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

Nor do I covet the mute commiseration of friends who don’t know what to say and so leave me to spill my guts by way of making conversation.

If the atmosphere of this country has suddenly become carnival-like, festive with fierce opinion, I do not feel invited to the party. I don’t care who’s president.

it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t.

because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character.

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

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.)

How lucky we are, when we’re spared what we think we want!

For that matter, that is the nature of resentment, the objection we cannot express. It is silence more than the complaint itself that makes the emotion so toxic,

Blame conveys clear lessons in which others may take comfort:

And I fear that Mary’s alternative outrage, her evangelical fever to bring the guilty to book, is a clamorous place that creates the illusion of a journey, a goal to be achieved, only so long as that goal remains out of reach.

I still wonder at a race grown so anthrocentric that all events from volcanoes to global temperature shift have become matters for which its individual members are answerable.

It would be only what it was.

expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.

But everybody says—, I thought. And then, distinctly: Beware of what “everybody says.”

my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn’t count.

I was at my most passionate about our son when he was not there.

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.

(In Kevin’s book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.)

The recovered get depressed, reclusive. They can’t handle it: being just like everybody else.

In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable. Hence I am no longer amazed by the frequency of public rampages with loaded automatics but by the fact that every ambitious citizen in America is not atop a shopping center looped with refills of ammunition. What Kevin did Thursday and what I did in Claverack’s waiting room today depart only in scale. Yearning to feel special, I was determined to capture someone’s attention, even if I had to use the murder of nine people to get it.

the ability to forgive is a gift of temperament,

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 displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay.

She had an available face, and there is something implicitly uninteresting about the look of a person who will tell you whatever you want to know.

The problem is guns.

Lol

In the long term, the only hope is that these shootings get so ordinary that they’re not news anymore.

It sucks because this is reality

Pretty much the definition of something happening is it’s bad.

It may be no more miraculous to pull the trigger of a bow or a gun than it is to reach for a glass of water. I fear that crossing into the “unthinkable” turns out to be no more athletic than stepping across the threshold of an ordinary room; and that, if you will, is the trick.