Lionel Shriver Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

  Lionel Shriver

  Children, Fields, Advent

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.26, Counterpoint Press

• 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.

  Lionel Shriver

  Children, Kids, Vanity

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.145, Counterpoint Press

• 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.

  Lionel Shriver

  Mother, I Like You, Hurt

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.143, Counterpoint Press

• Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.

  Lionel Shriver

  Children, Generations, Purpose

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.255, Counterpoint Press

• Holocausts do not amaze me. Rapes and child slavery do not amaze me. And Franklin, I know you feel otherwise, but Kevin does not amaze me. I am amazed when I drop a glove in the street and a teenager runs two blocks to return it. I am amazed when a checkout girl flashes me a wide smile with my change, though my own face had been a mask of expedience. Lost wallets posted to their owners, strangers who furnish meticulous directions, neighbors who water each other's houseplants - these things amaze me.

  Lionel Shriver

  Girl, Running, Children

  Lionel Shriver (2010). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.250, Profile Books

• I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old. ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself.

  Lionel Shriver

  Children, Motherhood, Years

• The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

  Lionel Shriver

  Mother, Children, Civilization

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.113, Counterpoint Press

• [Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

  Lionel Shriver

  Children, Book, Writing

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