“There is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role--hero, heroine, or villain.... Unlike the slight implications of quotidian dilemmas that confront the average citizen in other areas of life ... the stakes in this realm could not be higher. For chances are that at some point along the line you will hold in your hands another person's heart. There is no greater responsibility on the planet. However you contend with this fragile organ, which pounds or seizes in accordance with your caprice, will take your full measure.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“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, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it - the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“The idea is that you don't only have one destiny. Younger and younger, kids are pressed to decide what they want to do with their lives, as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go there are going to be upsides and downsides. You're dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one course in comparison to which all the others are crap.....There are varying advantages and disadvantages to each competing future. But I didn't want to have one bad and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“It was a whole world, his mouth, a whole unsuspected world, and kissing him occasioned the same sense of discovery as sliding a clear drop of plain tap water under a microscope and divining whole schools of fantastic fibrillose creatures, or pointing a telescope at a patch of sky pitch-dark to the naked eye and lo, it is spattered with stars.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you'd think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“For the living, death is thievery.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“In fact, because the unself-aware—which includes basically everybody—are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“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, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“«La imagen de un hombre haciéndose pajas había sido una de sus principales maneras de excitarse. ¿Por qué? Si sus propias sensaciones podían servirle de guía, follar con otra persona nunca salía del todo bien, nunca exactamente como debía. Le había encantado la idea de que fuera así, un hombre ciego con su propio placer.
»Y el autoerotismo era el sanctasanctórum, la auténtica definición de lo privado. Un número indeterminado de amantes de tiempos pasados se habían mostrado muy dispuestos a probar todas las variantes típicas y unas cuantas más, pero lo único que esos hombres nunca estaban dispuestos a hacer por voluntad propia —con una memorable excepción— era masturbarse delante de ella. Sin embargo, ése era el descubrimiento inicial del que manaba todo el sexo; era la fuente.
»La mayoría de los chicos se habrían masturbado cientos de veces antes de conocer carnalmente a una chica, y es famoso el poder alucinógeno de las pajas de la adolescencia. La torpeza y los titubeos característicos de tantos episodios en que las mujeres pierden la flor deben de ser, en comparación, una decepción a escala mundial.
»Incluso en la vida adulta, es casi seguro que muchos hombres siguen experimentando un éxtasis muy superior meneándosela encima del inodoro mientras piensan en una pareja imaginaria, que llevándose a la cama a mujeres de carne y hueso con celulitis y una irritante compulsión a decir “en realidad...” al comienzo de cada frase. Curioso, ¿no? Puesto que lo mismo podía decirse de las mujeres, lo verdaderamente curioso era por qué alguien se tomaba la molestia de follar».”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“She loved him, but that wasn't good enough. 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.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“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.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“Having buck teeth in junior high,” she rounded up unsteadily, “must
be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb
shock. It’s like, what’s going on? Why doesn’t anyone smile at me at
checkout anymore? But it won’t be a shock for me. It’ll be, oh that. That
again. Teeth.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“Are we talking a white dress and reception? Because I’ve been to loads of weddings, and I’ve had it. Friends resent the plane tickets and hotel bills; the happy couple resents the catering. Both parties think they’re doing the other a huge favor. The hoo-ha is over before you know it, and all anyone’s got to show for it is a hangover. Weddings are a racket, and the only people who profit are florists and bartenders.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person's company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one's existence - for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“His face churned. That was the point, before he said a word, that he broke her heart. The contortion of those muscles paraded a decision over whether to tell her the truth. Once he finally spoke, Lawrence's opting for the honesty route didn't nearly compensate for the fact that candor had been a choice. For an alternative direction to have beckoned, it was probably well trod.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person’s company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one’s existence—for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings. Hands”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“that it was valuable rather than merely expensive. Ramsey’s”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“While it was irrational to bristle at the company of compatriots, one of the traits that Americans seem to share is a common dislike of running into one another in foreign countries. Perhaps it was having that mirror held up, reflecting an image so often loud, aggressive, and overweight. Irina didn’t have a big problem with being American herself (everyone has to come from somewhere, and you don’t get to choose), although, a second-generation Russian on her mother’s side, she had always presumed her nationality to have an opt-out clause. Maybe she”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“they could make profitable use of his ample winnings and see the world. Were he not on tour for most of the year, they could finally enjoy a home life—the simple pleasures of coffee and Daily Telegraphs, clean windows and daffodils, cabernet and Newsnight.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“But one of the things you lose in the wisdom of age is the wisdom of youth. Education is not a steady process of accrual, but a touch-and-go contest between learning and forgetting, like frantically trying to fill a sink faster than it can empty through an open drain...”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“You were nice to me for almost ten years," he said gruffly. "Why should that count for nothing just because it's not going to be eleven?”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
“It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known- as if progressive intimacy didn't involve becoming more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant.”
― Lionel Shriver, quote from The Post-Birthday World
Lionel Shriver
Born place: in Gastonia, North Carolina, The United States
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“If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Men at Arms
“Be careful in your life, Tolui. I want you fit and strong for when I come for you.”
― Conn Iggulden, quote from Genghis: Birth of an Empire
“We froze. Neither of us moving, simply staring at each other, wondering if the other was going to move first. "You are," he whispered, "uncommonly stirring." He closed his eyes then, as if he had to in order to break the bond between us, then lifted me to the saddle and stared at the ground as he guided my feet into the stirrups.”
― Lisa Tawn Bergren, quote from Waterfall
“There's something solid and constant about trees." I said quietly. "They may change through the seasons, but they're always there. They're dependable.”
― Julianne Donaldson, quote from Edenbrooke
“New York City had a short memory for violence,”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Relic
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