Quote

The secret is that there is no secret.

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
Secret

More quotes by 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
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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
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
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
Image
Time itself made all things rare.
Lionel Shriver
Image
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
Image
But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
Image
...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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
A boy is a dangerous animal.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.
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
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
Image
So many stories are determined before they start.
Lionel Shriver
Image
[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
Image
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver