Lionel Shriver

“History is made of empires, and the United States was by far and away the greatest, richest, and fairest empire that had every dominated the earth. Inevitably, it would fall. Empires always did. But we were lucky, you said. We got to participate in the most fascinating social experiment ever attempted.”

“That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn't necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.”

“Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.”

“And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.”

“What did I expect, that you would wrap my rib cage with those enormous hands in which horses must be measured, lifting me overhead with the stern reproach that is every Western woman's sly delight, "You're too thin"?”

“Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.”

“These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive.”

“I was reminded of the time I got a free upgrade to first class, where I sat right next to Sean Connery. Tongue-tied, I couldn't think of a thing to say besides, "You're Sean Connery," of which presumably he was aware.”

“We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.”

“The word love was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupcons of resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people whom you cared for in your life.”

“For the living, death is thievery.”

“Should what you get up to fail to comport with who you think you are, something is surely inaccurate (and likely optimistic) about who you think you are.”

“It was really rather wretched that you couldn’t will yourself to fall in love, for the very effort can keep falling at bay. Nor could you will yourself to stay that way. Least of all could you will yourself NOT to fall in love, for thus far whatever meager resistance she had put up had only made the compulsion more intense. So you were perpetually tyrannized by a feeling that came and went as it pleased, like a cat with its own pet door. How much more agreeable, if love were something that you stirred up from a reliable recipe, or elected, however perversely, to pour down the drain. Still, there was nothing for it. The popular expression notwithstanding, love was not something you made. Nor could you dispose of the stuff once manifested because it was inconvenient, or even because it was wicked, and ruining your life, and, by the by, someone else’s.”

“Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?”

“Tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. It was as if some folks got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people’s outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger’s ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through this man’s fresh divorce and this woman’s throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody’s hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste.”

“The gap between most people’s capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean.”

“...I long ago gave up defending humanity. It's beyond me on most days to defend myself.”

“I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and extremely specific.”

“...Remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be obscurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeers. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around--well, it just didn't seem that different.”

“You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.”

“At only ten a.m., Edgar found himself already eyeing the Doritos on the counter. One thing he hadn't anticipated about the 'home office' was Snack Syndrome; lately his mental energies divided evenly between his new calling (worrying about money, which substituted neatly for earning it) and not stuffing his face.”

“I see now what they mean by "holding your head high," and I am sometimes surprised by how much interior transformation a ramrod posture can afford. When I stand physically proud, I feel a small measure less mortified.”

“Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]”

“Kevin z rozkoszą opisał sposób, w jaki ten trzynastolatek chciał stać się sławny: W środku nocy, około godziny 3.00, starsze małżeństwo zwróciło mu uwagę, że zbyt głośno słucha płyty zespołu The Monkees. W najbliższy weekend córka znalazła ich ciała leżące w łóżku, rozcięte od krocza do gardła i wypatroszone.- To okropne - powiedziałam. - Nie wiedziałam, że jeszcze ktoś słucha The Monkees.”

“[f]or most people, construction is tight, concentrated, bunchy, whereas vandalism offers release; you have to be quite an artist to give positive expression to abandon.”

“I was disquieted to realize that he had ceased to call me anything at all. That seemed impossible, but your children generally use your name when they want something, if only attention, and Kevin was loath to beseech me for so much as a turned head.”

“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.”

“...never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.”

“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.”

“You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.”

“You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.”

“What is cool changes; that there is such a thing as cool is immutable.”

“He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin.”

“He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing.”

“Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.”

“Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.”

“Yet in my experience, when left to their own devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.”

“We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.”

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

“He was already intuiting that attachment - if only to a squirt gun - made him vulnerable.”

“But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules; nothing.”

“He didn't like to be seen needing it - as if hunger were a sign of weakness.”

“It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.”

“Time hangs off me like molting skin.”

“I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.”

“Discomfort begets discomfort in others.”

“But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.”

“In Kevin's book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.”

“That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.”

“The secret is that there is no secret.”