About Lionel Shriver: Lionel Shriver is an American journalist and author. She is best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin which won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005.
Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.
A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a privat...
Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison. "Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with un...
However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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, whic...
For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis -- I don't care!" "Huh," I considered. "I guess I don't either". "Most people don't! All they care about," he added grimly, "is being right".
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�...
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 ...
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 ...
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 sw...
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.
In the end, that’s what Kevin has never forgiven us. He may not resent that we tried to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lurking behind it. But he does powerfully resent that we led him down the garden path—that we enticed h...
Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.
Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt.
Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
