Quotes by Lionel Shriver

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

In a country that doesnt discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

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 elses projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.

The secret is that there is no secret.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

Whoa, thats the kind of little sister I can dig! said Edison.Yes, were all alike, I said. We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we cant take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice were alive.

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.

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

“Time itself made all things rare.”

“Time hangs off me like molting skin.”

“But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricators credo that one doesnt so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.”

“Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it - the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.”

“Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesnt tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.”