"If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go."
- Lionel Shriver
"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 tha..."
"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..."
"There is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role--hero, heroine, or villain.... Unlike the slight implications of quotidian dilemmas that confront the aver..."
"For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis -- I don't care!""Huh," I considered. "I guess I don't either"."Most people don't! All they care about," he added grimly, "is being right"."
"Still, through a complex combination of optimism and longing and bravado, you would round it up. While a cruder name for this process is lying , one could make a case that delusion is a variant of gen..."
"I still get plenty anxious. The weird thing, and the unpleasant surprise for me, of proceeding well into the middle, perhaps even post-prime of my career is that writing books has not got any easier. ..."