95+ Lionel Shriver Quotes On Education, Talk About Kevin And Book

Lionel Shriver is an American journalist and author. She is best known for her 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Shriver is also the author of several other novels and non-fiction books, including So Much for That, The Post-Birthday World, and Big Brother. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Lionel Shriver on leadership, life, education.

Top 10 Lionel Shriver Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. My own apathy is bone chilling.
4. In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
5. Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
6. But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.
7. 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.
8. Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.
9. 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
10. Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.

Lionel Shriver Short Quotes

• Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
• Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.
• I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.
• ...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
• Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
• it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
• Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
• A boy is a dangerous animal.
• The secret is that there is no secret.
• The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

Lionel Shriver Quotes About Life

Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life. — Lionel Shriver

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life. — Lionel Shriver

The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job. — Lionel Shriver

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport. — Lionel Shriver

I have never in all my life considered you other people. — Lionel Shriver

...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. — Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver Quotes About Suppose

I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, make you safe. — Lionel Shriver

In fact, it's become politically important to offend people, because we have to fight back against this notion that being offensive should be against the law or something, and that everyone supposedly deserves "respect" for their often dopy views. — Lionel Shriver

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. — Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver Famous Quotes And Sayings

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it. — Lionel Shriver

Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all. — Lionel Shriver

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. — Lionel Shriver

The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction. — Lionel Shriver

Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly. — Lionel Shriver

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

I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old. ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself. — Lionel Shriver

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. — Lionel Shriver

When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear. — Lionel Shriver

We are not attracted to people because they are virtuous. In fact, there's something a little creepy about people who are too good. There is a big draw to people who are successful at breaking the rules. That means we end up admiring a lot of people that we think we shouldn't. — Lionel Shriver

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. — Lionel Shriver

It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in. — Lionel Shriver

The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity. — Lionel Shriver

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home. — Lionel Shriver

Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad. — Lionel Shriver

I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary. — Lionel Shriver

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry. — Lionel Shriver

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed. — Lionel Shriver

It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing. — Lionel Shriver

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers. — Lionel Shriver

Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring. — Lionel Shriver

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books. — Lionel Shriver

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

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story. — Lionel Shriver

Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison. "Yes, we're 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 can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive. — Lionel Shriver

One of my problems with terrorism is that it's self-evidently bad. The main thing that makes it complicated is the fact that it works. When you go at it with a moral hammer, it's really, really bad. It's so bad you wouldn't believe it because you don't accomplish anything. I think the one thing terrorists themselves are vulnerable to is mockery. It's an excellent weapon. — Lionel Shriver

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade. — Lionel Shriver

People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment. — Lionel Shriver

You can't be stylish and petty at the same time. — Lionel Shriver

Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them . — Lionel Shriver

It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness. — Lionel Shriver

How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want! — Lionel Shriver

It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood. — Lionel Shriver

Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water. — Lionel Shriver

When Mexico enjoys an economic boom while the U.S. is in dire fiscal straights, it seemed perfectly credible that Mexico would not roll out the welcome mat for unemployed Americans. — Lionel Shriver

Many, if not most, countries blithely expect their citizens to have carte blanche access to the U.S., "land of immigrants," as a veritable human right, but put up all manner of barriers to Americans who want to emigrate in the opposite direction. — Lionel Shriver

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

History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had every 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

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly. — Lionel Shriver

You were ambitious - for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously. — Lionel Shriver

The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one. — Lionel Shriver

Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't. — Lionel Shriver

For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not. — Lionel Shriver

For the living, death is thievery. — Lionel Shriver

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself. — Lionel Shriver

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. — Lionel Shriver

I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating. — Lionel Shriver

The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar. — Lionel Shriver

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. — Lionel Shriver

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away. — Lionel Shriver

So many stories are determined before they start. — Lionel Shriver

It was important to me to put together a future history that would scan, and serve as the backdrop to the domestic story. Economics is really what drives the plot. — Lionel Shriver

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

Perhaps I overemphasized the value of keeping busy.... I liked to imagine that I was incapable of doing nothing for afternoons myself, but maybe what disturbed me was that I was capable of it. I feared this was a knack one could get the hang of rather readily, and it was therefore now lurking in my house waiting for me to pick it up like a winter flu. — Lionel Shriver

I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts. — Lionel Shriver

Time itself made all things rare. — Lionel Shriver

That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable. — Lionel Shriver

Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess. — Lionel Shriver

Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal. — Lionel Shriver

But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon. — Lionel Shriver

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. — Lionel Shriver

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. — Lionel Shriver

It's always the mother's fault, ain't it?" she said softly, collecting her coat. "That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don't teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. — Lionel Shriver

...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances. — Lionel Shriver

...some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate. — Lionel Shriver

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

Life Lessons by Lionel Shriver

1. Life is full of surprises, and it's important to be prepared to adapt and adjust to new circumstances.
2. Taking risks and having the courage to pursue your dreams can lead to great rewards.
3. It's important to have a sense of purpose and to strive to make a positive impact on the world.