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Top Lionel Shriver Quotes

Browse top 180 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Lionel Shriver.

Favorite Lionel Shriver Quotes

1. "He wasn't mad, he was sad." ~ Lionel Shriver
2. "Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks." ~ Lionel Shriver
3. "How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!" ~ Lionel Shriver
4. "Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment." ~ Lionel Shriver
5. "Per quanto ammirevole, il tuo bisogno impellente di sacrificare l'esistenza per il bene di un'altra persona poteva dipendere dal fatto che quando avevi la vita interamente nelle tue mani, non sapevi che fartene. Immolarsi a volte è un'inutile scappatoia." ~ Lionel Shriver
6. "Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu." ~ Lionel Shriver
7. "One of us could always get pancreatic cancer," you said pleasantly." ~ Lionel Shriver
8. "Couples stray," said Edgar. "Part of the breaking-in process.""Not breaking in, breaking." Nicola differed sharply. "You can glue people together again. But then your relationship's like any other repaired object, with cracks, blobs of epoxy, a little askew. It's never the same. I can see you haven't a notion what I'm on about, so you'll have to take my word for it.""Christ, you're a babe in the woods." Edgar stopped slicing tomatoes. "You got it ass-backward. A marriage perched like porcelain on the mantelpiece is doomed. Sooner or later grown-ups treat each other like shit. You gotta be able to kick the thing around, less like china than an old shoe—bam, under the bed, or walk it through some puddles. No love's gonna last it if can't take abuse." ~ Lionel Shriver
9. "For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not." ~ Lionel Shriver
10. "Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess." ~ Lionel Shriver
11. "For the living, death is thievery." ~ Lionel Shriver
12. "Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them ." ~ Lionel Shriver
13. "I was disquieted to realize that he had ceased to call me anything at all. That seemed impossible, but your children generally use your name when they want something, if only attention, and Kevin was loath to beseech me for so much as a turned head." ~ Lionel Shriver
14. "His weight makes him a social pariah. It reduces the likelihood he'll remarry. It has grave implications for his health. But it isn't evil. Just like all that exercise of yours has nothing to do with being good. I know you think it does. It makes you feel good, and feel good about yourself, and feel superior to people who slob around all day. But it's mostly a waste of time that doesn't do anything for anybody else but you." ~ Lionel Shriver
15. "What did I expect, that you would wrap my rib cage with those enormous hands in which horses must be measured, lifting me overhead with the stern reproach that is every Western woman's sly delight, "You're too thin"?" ~ Lionel Shriver
16. "Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal." ~ Lionel Shriver
17. "History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had every dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted." ~ Lionel Shriver
18. "They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix." ~ Lionel Shriver
19. "It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in." ~ Lionel Shriver
20. "Holocausts do not amaze me. Rapes and child slavery do not amaze me. And Franklin, I know you feel otherwise, but Kevin does not amaze me. I am amazed when I drop a glove in the street and a teenager runs two blocks to return it. I am amazed when a checkout girl flashes me a wide smile with my change, though my own face had been a mask of expedience. Lost wallets posted to their owners, strangers who furnish meticulous directions, neighbors who water each other's houseplants - these things amaze me." ~ Lionel Shriver
21. "What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I've had my whole life that at any given time there's something I'm forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I'm supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation - I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it. When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I'd wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There'd be nothing I had to do. Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I've hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I've done my homework." ~ Lionel Shriver
22. "And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk." ~ Lionel Shriver
23. "The energy it sapped from him, not being able to protect her. You wouldn't think that something you couldn't do and were not doing would take any energy, but it did." ~ Lionel Shriver
24. "...never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year." ~ Lionel Shriver
25. "He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing." ~ Lionel Shriver
26. "It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness." ~ Lionel Shriver
27. "Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt." ~ Lionel Shriver
28. "A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it." ~ Lionel Shriver
29. "For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in anaccumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimismwere more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It washard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep thepast itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it." ~ Lionel Shriver
30. "But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon." ~ Lionel Shriver
31. "I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary." ~ Lionel Shriver
32. "You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself." ~ Lionel Shriver
33. "So many stories are determined before they start." ~ Lionel Shriver
34. "Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water." ~ Lionel Shriver
35. "Beware of what "everybody says"." ~ Lionel Shriver
36. "That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting." ~ Lionel Shriver
37. "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." ~ Lionel Shriver
38. "He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin." ~ Lionel Shriver
39. "It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing." ~ Lionel Shriver
40. "Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story." ~ Lionel Shriver
41. "My own apathy is bone chilling." ~ Lionel Shriver
42. "The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one." ~ Lionel Shriver
43. "Exasperatingly, we're all pretty much restricted to learning what people are like with the permanent confound of our own presence, which is why those chance glimpses of someone you love just walking down the street can seem so precious." ~ Lionel Shriver
44. "You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it." ~ Lionel Shriver
45. "The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction." ~ Lionel Shriver
46. "...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one." ~ Lionel Shriver
47. "Why would affluence make him mad?""Maybe he's mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it's very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do." ~ Lionel Shriver
48. "I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray." ~ Lionel Shriver
49. "How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?" ~ Lionel Shriver
50. "In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity." ~ Lionel Shriver
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Today's Quote

People only disappear when they have somewhere to go"
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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Thin
Wit
Con
Here
Self
Ear
Ally
Per
Ten
Hen
Use
Lit
Able
Hey
End
She
Act
Once
Bee
Sin
Old
Era
Call
Read
King
Thou
Does
Less
Pen
Ours
Cause
Late
Ring
Off
Child
Son
Side
Sure
Mad
Ways
Hear
Body
Rent
Kid
Seem
Cat
Lie
May
Itself
Owe

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