Kevin

“In the end, that’s what Kevin has never forgiven us. He may not resent that we tried to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lurking behind it. But he does powerfully resent that we led him down the garden path—that we enticed him with the prospect of the exotic. (Hadn’t I myself nourished the fantasy that I would eventually land in a country that was somewhere else?) When we shrouded our grown-up mysteries for which Kevin was too young, we implicitly promised him that when the time came, the curtain would pull back to reveal—what? Like the ambiguous emotional universe that I imagined awaited me on the other side of childbirth, it’s doubtful that Kevin had formed a vivid picture of whatever we had withheld from him. But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules, nothing.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there’s more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“It's not that I have no shame. Rather, I'm exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint. It is not an emotion that leads anywhere.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Over the years I observed Kevin watching decapitations, disembowelments, dismemberments, flayings, impalements, deoculations, and crucifixions, and I never saw him flinch. Because he'd mastered the trick. If you decline to identify, slice-and-dice is no more discomforting than watching your mother prepare beef stroganoff.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin