Quote

[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

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
Children
Messed
Writing
Ungrateful
Much
Apartment
Would
Precious
Time
Main
Books
Away
Book
Siphoned

More quotes by 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
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
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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
But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
Image
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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
Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
Lionel Shriver
Image
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
Image
Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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
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
Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
Lionel Shriver
Image
For the living, death is thievery.
Lionel Shriver
Image
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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 have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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