Top 250 Lionel Shriver Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “And there’s a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk.”

— Lionel Shriver

202. “The concept of duty was foreign to her, and it was only the people who acknowledged duty, and who had regard for duty, who got saddled with.”

— Lionel Shriver

203. “Myself, after having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles, and an upstairs neighbor who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”

— Lionel Shriver

204. “In 1999, and a mere ten days after a certain Thursday, eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold planted bombs in their Littleton, Colorado, high school and went on a shooting rampage that killed one teacher and twelve students, while wounding twenty-three, after which they shot themselves. So young Kevin – your choice – has turned out as American as a Smith and Wesson.”

— Lionel Shriver

205. “Later these thoughts would come back to haunt me, though I could not have anticipated that your compulsion to manhandle your unruly, misshapen experience into a tidy box, like someone trying to cram a wild tangle of driftwood into a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, as well as this sincere confusion of the is with the ought to be – your heartrending tendency to mistake what you actually had for what you desperately wanted – would produce such devastating consequences.”

— Lionel Shriver

206. “One of the most dreadful side effects of suspended animation was a horrifying inability to lie to himself. He had been neither a socialist nor an egalitarian. He had espoused socialism in the interest of his own glorification, and he had always felt superior to everyone else.”

— Lionel Shriver

207. “Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it’s worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it.”

— Lionel Shriver

208. “However intrigued by a “turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story.”

— Lionel Shriver

209. “Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. They’re not about the future at all. The future is just the ultimate monster in the closet, the great unknown.”

— Lionel Shriver

210. “Likewise the innards of my sole telephone socket are disgorged; my uncertain connection to the outside world dangles by two poorly soldered wires, and it often cuts off.”

— Lionel Shriver

211. “Why would I not know the context?” He took a single swallow from his glass. “I am the context.” He put the glass on the counter, and left. I’m certain of it: that moment, that hard swallow, is when he decided.”

— Lionel Shriver

212. “It’s not. What we talk about is what we think about, is what our lives are about. I’m not sure I want to spend mine looking over my shoulder at a generation whose lineage I’m personally helping to truncate. There’s something nihilistic about not having children, Franklin. As if you don’t believe in the whole human thing. If everyone followed our lead, the species would disappear in a hundred years.” “Get out,” you jeered. “Nobody has kids to perpetuate the species.”

— Lionel Shriver

213. “I want to let all this go when it still hurts to let it go. When we can still feel a sense of loss. When what we’re losing is still whole, and not corrupted, and diminished, and made dreadfully sad.”

— Lionel Shriver

214. “Obsequiousness was a quality that you bought. Fraudulence merely made the fawning seem more expensive.”

— Lionel Shriver

215. “Money is emotional,” Lowell pronounced. “Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it’s worth.”

— Lionel Shriver

216. “The future is just the ultimate monster in the closet, the great unknown.”

— Lionel Shriver

217. “He appeared to believe that because the university owed him his salary, it would ipso facto pay his salary, in a confusion of should and will that bordered on dyslexic.”

— Lionel Shriver

218. “Nollie’s having plotted their course with her fleX GPS turned out to be unnecessary. The directions all the way to the Nevada border at Wendover, Utah, came down to: “cross George Washington Bridge, then turn right.”

— Lionel Shriver

219. “The eerie disposition between player and piano put me in mind of Schroeder, banging out Beethoven on a toy.”

— Lionel Shriver

220. “Hoarding remained a synonym beloved of bureaucrats for retaining your own assets.”

— Lionel Shriver

221. “And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge will tempt one to jump off. The very insurmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness, was in the end what attracted me to it.”

— Lionel Shriver

222. “I do not run the federal mint. If they’ve decided to save on the costs of production, good for them. In an era of belt-tightening, it makes no sense to lavish resources on a mere medium of exchange, which has no value in and of itself but only represents value.”

— Lionel Shriver

223. “When Harriet was growing up, women were trying to immolate gender stereotypes. These days, you preserved the stereotype, the better not to correspond to it.”

— Lionel Shriver

224. “At last she got it: concept is incidental; execution is all.”

— Lionel Shriver

225. “My approach to parenthood was conditional, and the conditions were strict. I did not want to mother an imbecile or a paraplegic; whenever I saw fatigued women wheeling their stick-limbed progeny with muscular dystrophy for water therapy at Nyack Hospital, my heart didn’t melt, it sank.”

— Lionel Shriver

226. “I came to worry that I championed social justice largely to think well of myself.”

— Lionel Shriver

227. “And that was your perspective on your country as well: that it was not forever. That of course it was an empire, though that was nothing to be ashamed of. History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had ever dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted.”

— Lionel Shriver

228. “She herself was only sixty, though hers was the first generation to append “only” to such a sobering milestone.”

— Lionel Shriver

229. “What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. 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

230. “Sometimes I feel it right under my ribs. In my throat. Under my breastbone. It moves around. Sometimes it lodges in my lower back, and I slump in my chair. It’s an ache. It feels a little bit like having a mobile tumor or blood clot or kidney stone.”

— Lionel Shriver

231. “This sounds idiotic, but every time I encounter a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented with evidence of my public body.”

— Lionel Shriver

232. “Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn’t tell well. And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. I should know; I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray. Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.”

— Lionel Shriver

233. “Me, I’m a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus.”

— Lionel Shriver

234. “How in the face of an end game there was virtually no limit to what did not matter.”

— Lionel Shriver

235. “Slapping his shoulder was probably a mistake; he flinched. And for the briefest of moments I appreciated what little access we ever had to what really went on in Kevin’s head, since for a second the mask fell, and his face curdled with – well, with revulsion, I’m afraid. To allow even so brief a glimpse of its workings, he must have had other things on his mind.”

— Lionel Shriver

236. “Shep’s plight clearly illustrated that there was no point to anything and there was no relationship between virtue and reward and there never had been.”

— Lionel Shriver

237. “We can be world-beaters, and run whole companies, and then claim to be traumatized by a hand on our knee when helplessness is politically useful.”

— Lionel Shriver

238. “If we’ve learnt anything in our practice of medicine,” Kay whispered, “it’s that there may be a limit to how healthy and happy a person can get, but there’s no limit to suffering. So they can always make our lives worse.”

— Lionel Shriver

239. “That was one thing you could say for a life of complications: it made for good stories, though someone had always suffered for them.”

— Lionel Shriver

240. “Men have always gotten to name children after themselves, while not doing any of the work.”

— Lionel Shriver

241. “What do you make of the proposition that the definition of a truly free society is a place where you can still get away with something?”

— Lionel Shriver

242. “Then the same painless generosity spread to everything in a giddy hurtling rush, like that little threshold you cross when cleaning out closets, and suddenly, instead of agonizing over every heel-worn but still wearable pair of boots, parting with all the junk you’ll never use anyway is no longer a sacrifice but a joy.”

— Lionel Shriver

243. “Everything was dusty, and the fridge hadn’t been cleaned for months. Inside, the smoked salmon was swimming, the caviar had hatched, and the liqueur-filled dark chocolates had turned fright-white.”

— Lionel Shriver

244. “I backed off. Ever since obesity had become a social issue on top of a personal one, big people must have encountered the conviction that what they ate was everyone else’s business. In truth that chocolate bar did feel intensely like my business, but only because he was my brother. Whenever he ate rich or sweet things around me I got agitated, no less so than if he’d carved himself with a razor blade in plain view.”

— Lionel Shriver

245. “Our house had not been spurted with the Day-Glo spray of spontaneous outrage but slathered with a hatred that had reduced until it was thick and savorous, like a fine French sauce.”

— Lionel Shriver

246. “But I’ve never met anybody whose life has taken a sudden turn for the worse who thought a reversal of fortune was just what they had coming to them.”

— Lionel Shriver

247. “But real bravery and nobility entail losing everything you love by degrees like everyone else, and taking what comes like everyone else, and dying when you least expect it and when you don’t want to, like everyone else.”

— Lionel Shriver

248. “Yet what best protected privacy wasn’t concealment but apathy – the fact that other people simply weren’t interested.”

— Lionel Shriver

249. “Economics doesn’t reward nice. It rewards smart.”

— Lionel Shriver

250. “It was never possible to do something back to someone that would undo what he had done to you.”

— Lionel Shriver