Top 250 Lionel Shriver Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 6

151. “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

152. “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

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

— Lionel Shriver

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “Kevin folded his arms and looked satisfied; I had gone back to playing Mother. “I knew exactly what I was doing.” He leaned onto his elbows. “And I’d do it again.” “I.”

— Lionel Shriver

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed – since the more you prided yourself on knowing already the less you listened and the less you learned.”

— Lionel Shriver

162. “The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person’s company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one’s existence – for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings.”

— Lionel Shriver

163. “After all, a forgivable shyness and social discomfort could easily be mistaken for their more aggressive counterparts: aloofness and hostility.”

— Lionel Shriver

164. “If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.”

— Lionel Shriver

165. “Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can’t.”

— Lionel Shriver

166. “Someone had to insert a note of peevishness into this hellishly halcyon Keep Calm and Carry On. Generating some reputable resentment, giving voice to the free-floating outrage that imbued their environs like smoke from a burnt dinner – it was a job to do, as Avery’s tireless goodwill was a job. With corresponding self-sacrifice, he’d taken on the less glamorous task of reminding the rest that this sucked, it all sucked, it wasn’t fair!”

— Lionel Shriver

167. “You had bought us some other family’s dream house.”

— Lionel Shriver

168. “To the degree that Lawrence’s face was familiar, it was killingly so – as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known.”

— Lionel Shriver

169. “I wondered if that wasn’t the answer to the mystery, countrywide. 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 else that was decidedly less than okay.”

— Lionel Shriver

170. “Real poverty is about doing what you have to do as opposed to what you want.”

— Lionel Shriver

171. “His weight makes him a social pariah. It reduces the likelihood he’ll remarry. It has grave implications for his health. But it isn’t evil. Just like all that exercise of yours has nothing to do with being good. I know you think it does. It makes you feel good, and feel good about yourself, and feel superior to people who slob around all day. But it’s mostly a waste of time that doesn’t do anything for anybody else but you.”

— Lionel Shriver

172. “I’d no idea that you’d prove such an able apprentice. You were sure to be a journalist, in which case the chances were terribly high that you’d also be a prat.”

— Lionel Shriver

173. “The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.”

— Lionel Shriver

174. “No, this mother purled about her duties like a bubbling brook, and any number of stones hurled at her eddies sank with a harmless rattle to her bed.”

— Lionel Shriver

175. “Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn’t mean it’s fake.”

— Lionel Shriver

176. “Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo – charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.”

— Lionel Shriver

177. “Complacency has a way of restoring itself of its own accord.”

— Lionel Shriver

178. “Incredibly, the self-starved never appear capable of taking any pleasure in the very vessel for which they’ve sacrificed.”

— Lionel Shriver

179. “Infants have great intuition, because intuition’s about all they’ve got.”

— Lionel Shriver

180. “I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you’re related to.”

— Lionel Shriver

181. “Other people savor the symmetry of opposites.”

— Lionel Shriver

182. “The moving parts of the house were all silent, its surfaces smooth. The closet doors had no handles. None of the woodwork had fixtures. Drawers had gentle indents. The kitchen cabinets pushed open and shut with a click. Franklin, the whole house was on Zoloft. You.”

— Lionel Shriver

183. “Once I was no longer fussing with my coat, he said, “You may be fooling the neighbors and the guards and Jesus and your gaga mother with these goody-goody visits of yours, but you’re not fooling me. Keep it up if you want a gold star. But don’t be dragging your ass back here on my account.” Then he added, “Because I hate you.” I.”

— Lionel Shriver

184. “Economics is closer to religion than science.”

— Lionel Shriver

185. “He could see how this liberating condition could grow progressive. How in the face of an end game there was virtually no limit to what did not matter. Returned.”

— Lionel Shriver

186. “So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. 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

187. “This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling mad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.”

— Lionel Shriver

188. “This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that “feeling special” was a private experience, and no one else’s projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.”

— Lionel Shriver

189. “We need to recognise that slowing population growth is one of the most cost-effective and reliable ways of easing pressure on our environment and securing a sustainable future for us all.”

— Lionel Shriver

190. “At some point there was no almost.”

— Lionel Shriver

191. “We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.”

— Lionel Shriver

192. “And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.”

— Lionel Shriver

193. “Reading is an act of possession. You read it, you own it.”

— Lionel Shriver

194. “One of the things I learned with Charles,” said Gray carefully, “was that finding someone like you does not necessarily mean that either of you should be that way.”

— Lionel Shriver

195. “I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier.”

— Lionel Shriver

196. “It’s just, people throwing around fashionable lingo think they’re so hip and imaginative. But you can’t be hip and imaginative. You can be unhip and imaginative, or hip and conformist.”

— Lionel Shriver

197. “There’s no better way to get people to cooperate in this country than by seeming a little unhinged.”

— Lionel Shriver

198. “Only in retrospect do I appreciate that this “doing your bit” is a deadly misapprehension of the nature of familial ties. Better understanding them now, I find blood relationships rather frightening. What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you.”

— Lionel Shriver

199. “Before I found out for myself, I might have imagined that in the aftermath of personal apocalypse, the little bothers of life would effectively vanish. But it’s not true. You still feel chills, you still despair when a package is lost in the mail, and you still feel irked to discover you were shortchanged at Starbucks.”

— Lionel Shriver

200. “I did not love running. Here’s a pointer for you: no one does. They pretend to, but they are lying. The only good part is having run. In the moment, it’s dull and hard as in effortful but not as in difficult to master. It’s repetitive. It does not open the floodgates of revelation, as I am you’ve been led to expect.”

— Lionel Shriver