Lionel Shriver

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.

You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.

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.

It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

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.

Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.

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