Quote

it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.

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
Impress
Ignorant
Ignorance
Difficult
Always

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

Image
Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
Lionel Shriver
Image
I have never in all my life considered you other people.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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
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
Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.
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
The secret is that there is no secret.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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
...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
Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
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
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
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
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
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
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
People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver