Lionel Shriver 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

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

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

[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

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

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

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