Big Brother Quotes

“The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison.
"Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“So when I said I'd miss him, I meant I would miss what we had not experienced, and I don't know what that's called: nostalgia for what didn't happen.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Only in retrospect do I appreciate that this “doing your bit” is a deadly misapprehension of the nature of familial ties. Better understanding them now, I find blood relationships rather frightening. What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Now, over the years I've been forced to conclude that most celebrations don't work. The more carefully planned a signal occasion, the more likely it will trickle by on a pale tide of dilute well-meaningness. Christmases, birthdays, award ceremonies, and weddings are swallowed by planning and preparation on the one side and cleaning up on the other, and almost never seem to have actually happened.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“It's as if your money, by conceit inexhaustible, isn't real, so your generosity isn't real, either.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that “feeling special” was a private experience, and no one else’s projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“If I were that big a load, I'd be depressed, too".
That was the chicken-and-egg question I'd not been able to parse. Was Edison fat because he was depressed, or depressed because he was fat?
"He really thrives on how nice Cody is to him," I said. "I don't think most people are very nice. I've seen it, when we're out and about. The looks. As if he's--doing something to them, as if he's an affront. The worst is in the supermarket. With the mounded cart. I feel like I'm surrounded by a giant eye roll.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“The eerie disposition between player and piano put me in mind of Schroeder, banging out Beethoven on a toy.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“I backed off. Ever since obesity had become a social issue on top of a personal one, big people must have encountered the conviction that what they ate was everyone else's business. In truth that chocolate bar did feel intensely like my business, but only because he was my brother. Whenever he ate rich or sweet things around me I got agitated, no less so than if he'd carved himself with a razor blade in plain view.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“I wondered if that wasn't the answer to the mystery, countrywide. It wasn't that eating was so great-it wasn't-but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“It's not your job to be *pre-disappointed* for him, dig? You...go on and on about how big and terrible 'the world' is. Well, maybe so. But in that case, it's the world's job to be big and terrible, not yours.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“It wasn't that eating was so great--it wasn't--but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything that was decidedly less than okay.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Incredibly, the self-starved never appear capable of taking any pleasure in the very vessel for which they've sacrificed.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Maybe the greatest favor a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Even if he doesn't go to college, he could at least learn to make something. Nobody in this country knows how to sink a nail anymore. They're all dependent on the tradesmen their kids are taught not to become.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn't mean it's fake.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn't a very nice sensation not to want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing.”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“I wondered why people ever tried to accomplish anything when attainment of every sort was inbuilt with the forlorn 'Well so-- what's next?”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you, when they didn't?”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother

“Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat”
― Lionel Shriver, Big Brother