Quotes by Lionel Shriver

You restored me to the concept of home.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone elses story.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303

You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.

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.

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.

A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.

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

We all do it (or I used to-yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isnt customary to say, Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because Im going to go masturbate.

...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, its against the rules, isnt it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didnt.

To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old - which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.

How lucky we are, when we are spared what we think we want!

Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd -- slavery, incest, a suicide -- I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. Ive learned since that tragedy is not to be hoarded. Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket. Id readily donate my story to the Salvation Army so that some other frump in need of color could wear it away.

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.

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in anaccumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimismwere more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It washard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep thepast itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they cant have that they dont think for a second about whether they really want it.

Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasnt the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisans life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.