X

Sort by

Quote length

Sentiment

Change font

Change background

Lionel Shriver Inspirational Quotes (56)

Page 2 of 3
Filter & Style
Image
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
Image
...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
Image
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
Image
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
Image
The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
Lionel Shriver
Image
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
Image
...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
Image
Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
Lionel Shriver
Image
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
Image
My own apathy is bone chilling.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
Image
Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.
Lionel Shriver
Image
I have never in all my life considered you other people.
Lionel Shriver
Image
But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
Image
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
Image
The secret is that there is no secret.
Lionel Shriver
Image
People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver
Image
For the living, death is thievery.
Lionel Shriver
Previous
Next