Lionel Shriver Quotes

66 quotes in 1115 categories

• Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.
• In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose…
• We need to recognise that slowing population growth is one of the most cost-effective and reliable ways of easing pressure on our environment and securing…
• Time itself made all things rare.
• When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of…
• A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship, it must be maintained, and with far more devotion…
• Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.
• ...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever;…
• You were ambitious - for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most…
• There is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role--hero, heroine, or villain.... Unlike the slight implications of quotidian…
• Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so…
• Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware…
• Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor…
• Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
• It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.
• The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.
• Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.
• 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…
• The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
• In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

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