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We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver
Top 10 Best Quotes
“...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.”
“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.”
“It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.”
“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.”
“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”
“Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.”
“Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.”
“I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
safety, sad, gullibility, attachment, dangerous, infamy, loss, fame, unconditional-love, right-and-wrong, life, innocence, damage, expectations, parenting, safe, good-hearted, apathy