Top 250 Lionel Shriver Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The secret is that there is no secret.”

— Lionel Shriver

2. “Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.”

— Lionel Shriver

3. “My own apathy is bone chilling.”

— Lionel Shriver

4. “How lucky we are, when we’re spared what we think we want!”

— Lionel Shriver

5. “Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain – which.”

— Lionel Shriver

6. “Because when you get sick, I think that’s the hardest part: living in a separate universe from everyone else, like having been exiled to a foreign country.”

— Lionel Shriver

7. “Reading time is precious. Don’t waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.”

— Lionel Shriver

8. “Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.”

— Lionel Shriver

9. “Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.”

— Lionel Shriver

10. “I was suffering from the delusion that it’s the thought that counts.”

— Lionel Shriver

11. “Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.”

— Lionel Shriver

12. “Language is alive, and you can’t put it in the freezer. But.”

— Lionel Shriver

13. “Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.”

— Lionel Shriver

14. “The good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job.”

— Lionel Shriver

15. “Fear is an isometric exercise.”

— Lionel Shriver

16. “Franklin, the whole house was on Zoloft.”

— Lionel Shriver

17. “Then, you were always captivated by self-sacrifice. However admirable, your eagerness to give your life over to another person may have been due in some measure to the fact that when your life was wholly in your lap you didn’t know what to do with it. Self-sacrifice was an easy way out.”

— Lionel Shriver

18. “Orderliness readily slides to conformity over time.”

— Lionel Shriver

19. “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

20. “I didn’t care about anything. And there’s a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.”

— Lionel Shriver

21. “The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.”

— Lionel Shriver

22. “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

23. “It’s far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.”

— Lionel Shriver

24. “I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story.”

— Lionel Shriver

25. “I thought at the time that I couldn’t be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.”

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

27. “That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.”

— Lionel Shriver

28. “You were nice to me for almost ten years,” he said gruffly. “Why should that count for nothing just because it’s not going to be eleven?”

— Lionel Shriver

29. “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

30. “Some people think that asking a question gives them a right to know the answer somehow. Well, it’s not true. You’ve no right to anything. I’ll tell you what I want to. I don’t care what you ask.”

— Lionel Shriver

31. “Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.”

— Lionel Shriver

32. “It’s an apathy so absolute that it’s like a hole you might fall in.”

— Lionel Shriver

33. “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 than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help.”

— Lionel Shriver

34. “Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat.”

— Lionel Shriver

35. “Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.”

— Lionel Shriver

36. “The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.”

— Lionel Shriver

37. “But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.”

— Lionel Shriver

38. “Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.”

— Lionel Shriver

39. “Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon – the smallest of compromises, the little roundings off or slight recastings of one emotion as another that is a tad nicer or more flattering.”

— Lionel Shriver

40. “If you take that away from me, and every other opportunity to not quite toe the line,” Willing said, “then however many amusing things I’m at liberty to do, I don’t feel free. If I don’t feel free, I’m not free.” I don’t feel free, Willing did not add, and I have not felt free since you and yours jammed this fleck of metal into my neck.”

— Lionel Shriver

41. “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.”

— Lionel Shriver

42. “People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.”

— Lionel Shriver

43. “Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.”

— Lionel Shriver

44. “The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.”

— Lionel Shriver

45. “Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who’s in them .”

— Lionel Shriver

46. “Just cause you get used to something doesn’t mean you like it.” He added, snapping the magenta, “You’re used to me.”

— Lionel Shriver

47. “Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.”

— Lionel Shriver

48. “But one of the things you lose in the wisdom of age is the wisdom of youth. Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain...”

— Lionel Shriver

49. “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

50. “No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn’t have any real concept of other people – that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn’t real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.”

— Lionel Shriver