Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin Quotes

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.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Time itself made all things rare.

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

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

The secret is that there is no secret.

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

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

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

...trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.

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

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.

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.

Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, "son might turn out to be a killer" would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. H

How lucky we are, when we are spared what we think we want!

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it's against the rules, isn't it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn't.

He wasn't mad, he was sad.

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

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

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303

If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.

You restored me to the concept of home.

I glory in the emotionally commonplace