Top 250 Lionel Shriver Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.”

— Lionel Shriver

52. “Time itself made all things rare.”

— Lionel Shriver

53. “We’d been assured it wouldn’t be painful, though she might experience ‘discomfort,’ a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn’t yours.”

— Lionel Shriver

54. “High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living. For all practical purposes, affluent New Yorkers resided in a crowded, cluttered version of the countryside, where you had to drive five miles for a quart of milk. Florence.”

— Lionel Shriver

55. “I wasn’t brave, but I was stubborn and prideful. Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it’s not as pretty.”

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

57. “Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.”

— Lionel Shriver

58. “With no interruptions to admire dolly outfits, no tomorrow is a school day, we gorged on fruit and sorbet and splashed immoderate second shots of clear heady framboise, whooping at each others’ top-this tales in the orgy of eternal adolescence characteristic of the childless in middle age.”

— Lionel Shriver

59. “I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn’t initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used.”

— Lionel Shriver

60. “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

61. “So much lying in marriage is merely a matter of keeping quiet.”

— Lionel Shriver

62. “Bur Armenians have a talent for sorrow.”

— Lionel Shriver

63. “Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.”

— Lionel Shriver

64. “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

65. “Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better.”

— Lionel Shriver

66. “Presenting emotions as facts-which they are-affords a fragile defense.”

— Lionel Shriver

67. “But since we’ve been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards.”

— Lionel Shriver

68. “They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him – because broken machines are easier to fix.”

— Lionel Shriver

69. “The liberation of adulthood as we’d conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed we became our own tyrants.”

— Lionel Shriver

70. “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

71. “The existence of other people is essentially awkward.”

— Lionel Shriver

72. “There’s something nihilistic about not having children.”

— Lionel Shriver

73. “The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies.”

— Lionel Shriver

74. “Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me.”

— Lionel Shriver

75. “Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.”

— Lionel Shriver

76. “But many, perhaps most siblings share a private universe tropical with benevolence, betrayal, vendetta, reconciliation, and the use and abuse of power of which their parents know practically nothing.”

— Lionel Shriver

77. “Take care of the components, ad the sum of their parts unfolds as if by magic.”

— Lionel Shriver

78. “I wondered why people ever tried to accomplish anything when attainment of every sort was inbuilt with the forlorn ‘Well so – what’s next?”

— Lionel Shriver

79. “Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart.”

— Lionel Shriver

80. “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

81. “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. Evidence to the contrary found nowhere to lodge, like a book on chaos theory in a library that didn’t have a physics section.”

— Lionel Shriver

82. “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

83. “So many stories are determined before they start.”

— Lionel Shriver

84. “I realise its commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, “I love you, but i don’t always like you.” But what kind of love is that? it seems to me that comes down to, I’m not oblivious to you – that is, you ca still hurt my feelings – but i cant stand having you around.” Who wants to be loved like that? I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, “I like you.” I wonder if just enjoying your kids company isn’t more important.”

— Lionel Shriver

85. “Please tell me you’re not listening to that Shriver woman. She’s a hysteric. And so annoyingly smug, as if she wants civilization to collapse, just so she can be proved right. I can’t bear the sound of her voice.”

— Lionel Shriver

86. “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

87. “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

88. “I’ve never been shy. I’ve just waited until I had something to say.”

— Lionel Shriver

89. “Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present.”

— Lionel Shriver

90. “I have never in all my life considered you other people.”

— Lionel Shriver

91. “I always prefer socializing at night-it is implicitly more wanton.”

— Lionel Shriver

92. “Like most disguises, the cover-up was worse than honest flaw, a lesson I had yet to register on my own account.”

— Lionel Shriver

93. “Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you, when they didn’t?”

— Lionel Shriver

94. “For that matter, thinking of one’s self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.”

— Lionel Shriver

95. “Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it’s not as pretty.”

— Lionel Shriver

96. “In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting.”

— Lionel Shriver

97. “I’m a journalist, and journalists need news. Deprive them of it, and they go a bit barking. Deprive them of news long enough, and they’ll make their own – much the way the starving will eventually turn to cannibalism.”

— Lionel Shriver

98. “Yet in my experience, when left to their own devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.”

— Lionel Shriver

99. “The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.”

— Lionel Shriver

100. “I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.”

— Lionel Shriver