Quote

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

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
People
Attachment
Step
Short
Seem
Steps
Seems
Used
Anything
Adaptation

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
For the living, death is thievery.
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
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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
Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Lionel Shriver
Image
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
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
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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
Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
Lionel Shriver
Image
So many stories are determined before they start.
Lionel Shriver
Image
I have never in all my life considered you other people.
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
Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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
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
I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
Image
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver