Quote

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

Lionel Shriver

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lionel Shriver
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 18
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Gastonia
North Carolina
Margaret Ann Shriver
Margaret Shriver
Followed
Rules
Failing
Mother
Ends
Always
Failings

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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
Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
Image
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
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
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
Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
Image
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel Shriver
Image
The secret is that there is no secret.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Time itself made all things rare.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
Image
it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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 am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
Lionel Shriver
Image
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