Top 250 Lionel Shriver Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Like most disguises, the cover-up was worse than honest flaw, a lesson I had yet to register on my own account.”

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “A boy is a dangerous animal.”

— 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. “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

113. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

119. “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

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. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

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

— Lionel Shriver

127. “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

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

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

— Lionel Shriver

131. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

133. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

138. “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

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

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

— Lionel Shriver

142. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

144. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

146. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

148. “Likewise, the simple adjacency of warm bodies supplies the deepest of animal comfort.”

— Lionel Shriver

149. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver