Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
38 quotes
"Time itself made all things rare."
"Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?"
"...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed."
"They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix. p303"
"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."
"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."
"I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to."
"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."
"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"
"Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life."
"Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade."
"Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]"
"If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go."
"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."
"I glory in the emotionally commonplace"
"This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling mad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad."
"This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad."
"He wasn't mad, he was sad."
"In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable."
"You restored me to the concept of home."
"I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story."
"You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it."
"My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you."
"In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity."