For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
Lionel ShriverRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote questions the purpose of life in relation to having children and the perpetuation of aimlessness across generations.
Lionel Shriver's quote delves into the existential inquiry about life and purpose, particularly concerning parenthood. It suggests that merely continuing life through offspring does not inherently provide meaning; instead, it may reflect a cyclical distraction from the deeper questions of existence. In this view, procreation can be seen as a way of deferring the search for purpose rather than resolving it, hinting at a potentially infinite cycle of aimlessness passed down through generations.
Themes
PurposeChildrenLifeMeaningExistenceAimlessness
In practice
Example use cases
In discussions about the responsibilities of parenthood at a family gathering.
More from Lionel Shriver
All quotes →In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
Lionel ShriverRead
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel ShriverRead
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Lionel ShriverRead
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Lionel ShriverRead
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 ShriverRead
Similar quotes
But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?
Robert KennedyRead
The statement that 'God is dead' comes from Nietzsche and has recently been trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians. But the good Lord has not died of this; He who dwells in the heaven laughs at them.
Karl BarthRead
Mattia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tattoo, and from both of their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning.
Paolo GiordanoRead
The fact that a man has no claim on others ... does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial assistance.
Ayn RandRead
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Henry David ThoreauRead
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!
Charles DickensRead