The Motion of the Body Through Space Quotes

“It's just, people throwing around fashionable lingo think they're so hip and imaginative. But you can't be hip and imaginative. You can be unhip and imaginative, or hip and conformist.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space: Sharp Literary Satire – Cult of Exercise, Aging, and Marriage Crisis

“I did not love running. Here's a pointer for you: no one does. They pretend to, but they are lying. The only good part is having run. In the moment, it's dull and hard as in effortful but not as in difficult to master. It's repetitive. It does not open the floodgates of revelation, as I am you've been led to expect.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space

“I did not love running. Here’s a pointer for you: no one does. They pretend to, but they’re lying. The only good part is having run. In the moment,”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space

“How much kinder it would have been, to turn off, like an appliance. The gradual, drawn-out corruption of the body while its host was still trapped inside was a torture of a sort they would have contrived at Guantanamo, or Bergen-Belsen. Every old age was an Edgar Allan Poe story.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space: Sharp Literary Satire – Cult of Exercise, Aging, and Marriage Crisis

“1980s. The acquisition racked up yet another substantial expense, for Remington had fallen prey to the very American impulse to lavish money on what could not be bought.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space

“The very best thing about getting old was basking in this great big not-giving-a-shit.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space: Sharp Literary Satire – Cult of Exercise, Aging, and Marriage Crisis

“as self-satisfaction, and their contentment came across as exclusionary.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space

“how curious it was that couples with the largest families were so frequently the very people least capable of supporting them,”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space

“the only good things about getting old was mutual permission to be imperfect.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space

“She herself was only sixty, though hers was the first generation to append "only" to such a sobering milestone.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space

“Your honeybunch may not be able to make you feel all warm and gooey inside anymore," Deacon said. "But the ability to fuck you up, well--it's the last magic power to go.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space

“We can be world-beaters, and run whole companies, and then claim to be traumatized by a hand on our knee when helplessness is politically useful.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space: Sharp Literary Satire – Cult of Exercise, Aging, and Marriage Crisis

“did not love running. Here’s a pointer for you: no one does. They pretend to, but they’re lying. The only good part is having run.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space: Sharp Literary Satire – Cult of Exercise, Aging, and Marriage Crisis

“The expectation that, if not virtue, then at least good practice would necessarily be rewarded was naive, but that didn't alter the ferocity of the feeling - that ”
― Lionel Shriver, The Motion of the Body Through Space