Lionel Shriver citations

“The good life doesn't knock on the door.
Joy is a job.”

“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.”

“A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.”

“… You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.”

“I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.”

“It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.”

“Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.”

“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.”

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”

“Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.”

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

“I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.”

“The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.”

“Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.”

“I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.”

“How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!”

“Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better.”

“People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.”

“The existence of other people is essentially awkward.”

“It's queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them”

“But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.”

“Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.”

“Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.”

“It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.”

“Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.”

“I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.”

“That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.”

“Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.”

“We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.”