Top 250 Lionel Shriver Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

106. “A boy is a dangerous animal.”

— Lionel Shriver

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

123. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

135. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

138. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

140. “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

141. “You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.”

— Lionel Shriver

142. “Blame confers an awesome power. And it’s simplifying, not only to onlookers and victims, but to culprits most of all.”

— Lionel Shriver

143. “The romances between strangers are somewhere between inaccessible and incomprehensible to other people...”

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

145. “However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.”

— Lionel Shriver

146. “Woe to those who spare no expense. I should know, since these are travelers who scorn AWAP for holidays in “foreign” countries so comfortable they qualify as near death experiences.”

— Lionel Shriver

147. “For all our squinting at the two sexes to blur them into duplicates, few hearts race when passing gaggles of giggling schoolgirls. But any woman who passes a clump of testosterone-drunk punks without picking up the pace, without avoiding the eye contact that might connote challenge or invitation, without sighing inwardly with relief by the following block, is a zoological fool. A boy is a dangerous animal.”

— Lionel Shriver

148. “Real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.”

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

150. “Of course for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary – just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing’s mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer.”

— Lionel Shriver