LSLionel Shriver

67 collected words

Lionel Shriver

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

We all do it (or I used to-yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn't customary to say, "Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I'm going to go masturbate.

Lionel Shriver / quote

02Undated

...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 / quote

03Undated

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, 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.

Lionel Shriver / quote

04Undated

To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.

Lionel Shriver / quote

05Undated

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

Lionel Shriver / quote

06Undated

Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd -- slavery, incest, a suicide -- I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I've learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. I'd readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away.

Lionel Shriver / quote

07Undated

I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense.

Lionel Shriver / quote

08Undated

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

Lionel Shriver / quote

09Undated

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 / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan's life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.

Lionel Shriver / quote

12Undated

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

Lionel Shriver / quote

13Undated

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

Lionel Shriver / quote

14Undated

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 / quote

15Undated

The secret is that there is no secret.

Lionel Shriver / quote

16Undated

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

Lionel Shriver / quote

17Undated

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 / quote

18Undated

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

Lionel Shriver / quote

19Undated

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

Lionel Shriver / quote