Top 250 Lionel Shriver Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Between ourselves, I’ve started to worry that in some backhanded way I’ve become attached to the disfigurement of my own life.”

— Lionel Shriver

102. “I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.”

— Lionel Shriver

103. “This was food without you. Our loft, rich with the international booty of baskets and carvings, took on the tacky, cluttered aspect of an import outlet: This was our home without you. Objects had never seemed so inert, so pugnaciously incompensatory. Your remnants mocked me: the jump rope limp on its hook; the dirty socks, stiff, caricatured deflations of your size eleven feet.”

— Lionel Shriver

104. “Even if he doesn’t go to college, he could at least learn to make something. Nobody in this country knows how to sink a nail anymore. They’re all dependent on the tradesmen their kids are taught not to become.”

— Lionel Shriver

105. “For the living, death is thievery.”

— Lionel Shriver

106. “They still want credit for being tolerant, without taking the rap for the fact that you only ‘tolerate’ what you can’t stand.”

— Lionel Shriver

107. “So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfactions of agency: I wreck, therefore I am.”

— Lionel Shriver

108. “I was never shy. I was waiting to have something to say.”

— Lionel Shriver

109. “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

110. “Mourning the death of strangers is a blunted butter knife experience, bearing no resemblance to the slicing, machete-like bereavement of losing someone you know.”

— Lionel Shriver

111. “Just because there are lots of them doesn’t mean that the hot apple pies aren’t excellent or that it isn’t a privilege to live in a time when you can buy them for 99 cents. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn’t necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare.”

— Lionel Shriver

112. “The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes.”

— Lionel Shriver

113. “The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.”

— Lionel Shriver

114. “Is there any place you think is better?” asked Shep. “No,” Jackson said readily. “Of course not. They’re all the same. It’s human nature, man. You give anybody the power to take other people’s money, as much as they want, you think over time they’ll start taking less? Or work more for it, when they can get away with doing practically nothing? Governments are all the same, man. They eat their own countries until there’s nothing left. They’re cannibals.” Carol.”

— Lionel Shriver

115. “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

116. “There’s no more doomed a struggle than a battle with the imaginary.”

— Lionel Shriver

117. “I am a bundle of other people’s histories, a creature of circumstance.”

— Lionel Shriver

118. “A boy is a dangerous animal.”

— Lionel Shriver

119. “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 that’s prospectively boring to strangers.”

— Lionel Shriver

120. “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

121. “Time hangs off me like molting skin.”

— Lionel Shriver

122. “The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there’s more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species.”

— Lionel Shriver

123. “Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.”

— Lionel Shriver

124. “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

125. “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 the badness there is no more fear.”

— Lionel Shriver

126. “But too strictly observed, most sacraments grow hollow.”

— Lionel Shriver

127. “And there’s an ownership to destruction, an intimacy: an appropriation.”

— Lionel Shriver

128. “It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.”

— Lionel Shriver

129. “Over the years I observed Kevin watching decapitations, disembowelments, dismemberments, flayings, impalements, deoculations, and crucifixions, and I never saw him flinch. Because he’d mastered the trick. If you decline to identify, slice-and-dice is no more discomforting than watching your mother prepare beef stroganoff.”

— Lionel Shriver

130. “I believe the impulse to write comes out of a failure to communicate by any other means.”

— Lionel Shriver

131. “I have theorized that you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and that it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive.”

— Lionel Shriver

132. “What strikes me as people in diners rail at each other at the counter when before they ate in silence is not how imperiled they feel, but how safe. Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment. But.”

— Lionel Shriver

133. “You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.”

— Lionel Shriver

134. “Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn’t a very nice sensation not to want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing.”

— Lionel Shriver

135. “They had no comprehension of why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn’t pretty.”

— Lionel Shriver

136. “We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats – including sombreros.”

— Lionel Shriver

137. “A well-constructed lie is assembled largely from the alphabet blocks of fact, which will as easily make a pyramid as a platform.”

— Lionel Shriver

138. “We agreed that whether we became parents would be ‘the single most important decision we would ever make together.’ Yet the very momentousness of the decision guaranteed that it never seemed real, and so remained on the level of whimsy. Every time one of us raised the question of parenthood, I felt like a seven-year-old contemplating a Thumbelina that wets iself for Christmas.”

— Lionel Shriver

139. “Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile.”

— Lionel Shriver

140. “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

141. “I’ve found that people’s generalizations are largely illuminating about themselves.”

— Lionel Shriver

142. “I have spent less time thinking about my husband than thinking about lunch.”

— Lionel Shriver

143. “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

144. “Rarely is the object of your attentions innately dull or compelling. Nothing is interesting if you are not interested.”

— Lionel Shriver

145. “Are we talking a white dress and reception? Because I’ve been to loads of weddings, and I’ve had it. Friends resent the plane tickets and hotel bills; the happy couple resents the catering. Both parties think they’re doing the other a huge favor. The hoo-ha is over before you know it, and all anyone’s got to show for it is a hangover. Weddings are a racket, and the only people who profit are florists and bartenders.”

— Lionel Shriver

146. “It wasn’t that eating was so great – it wasn’t – but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything that was decidedly less than okay.”

— Lionel Shriver

147. “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 has no earthly clue who you are.”

— Lionel Shriver

148. “How much kinder it would have been, to turn off, like an appliance. The gradual, drawn-out corruption of the body while its host was still trapped inside was a torture of a sort they would have contrived at Guantanamo, or Bergen-Belsen. Every old age was an Edgar Allan Poe story.”

— Lionel Shriver

149. “Speak of the devil. Luella had wandered in wearing what might once have been a stylish frock, but the hem was shredded from her having torn at it, and the sky-blue fabric was encrusted with food. The bloop of her stomach echoed the bulge of an adult diaper at the rear. Carter had grown accustomed to this decayed incarnation of his father’s second wife, but fifteen years earlier the shock had been profound.”

— Lionel Shriver

150. “I have reflected on the fact that for most of us, there is a hard, impassable barrier between the most imaginatively detailed depravity and its real-life execution.”

— Lionel Shriver