{"author":"Lionel Shriver","author_id":"Lionel+Shriver","total_quotes":67,"quotes":[{"text":"I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["mother","rules"],"id":20108,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"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.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["happiness","temperature"],"id":28585,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["parenting","unconditional-love"],"id":51141,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"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 private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["fame","happiness","recognition","special"],"id":62334,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["life-and-living"],"id":62991,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"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.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["children","kids","motherhood","parenting"],"id":63164,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan's life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["artists","need","perfectionism"],"id":75245,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"He wasn't mad, he was sad.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["lionel-shriver","pathos","sadness"],"id":80100,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["internet"],"id":82132,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"},{"text":"My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.","author":"Lionel Shriver","tags":["life","lionel-shriver","regret","we-need-to-talk-about-kevin"],"id":99337,"author_id":"Lionel+Shriver"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":67,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}