"But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie a..."
- Lionel Shriver
"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."
"The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job."
"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 bro..."
"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."
"Time itself made all things rare."
"The existence of other people is essentially awkward."
"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."
"Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically depr..."