Lionel Shriver Quotes

Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.

Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.

Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.

Who says I can't be free from all of the things that I used to be?

If you're dissatisfied anywhere, New York is the place to be. If you're unhappy at college in Topeka, I don't know what there is to distract yourself with, you know? So anyway, I distracted myself until I decided that the distraction could be a school in and of itself.

I quit my job. I bought myself a real cheap, like, around-the-world flight ticket, and I went to 16 countries for six months just backpacking, living in cheap hostels, looking for stories with a camera and my ex-girlfriend.

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

Shooting movies has changed, and me too - I have changed. And then, every film I do, something in my mind, my soul, changes. My natural change, I change at the same time as the films, I think.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

You can't leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.

The physical journey in my films is indicative of the internal journey that my characters take.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?

I always think that in a big city, anything is possible, including reinventing yourself.

I always like seeing people transforming themselves, in whatever way that might be, and a different accent is part of that.

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes -- with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

Ignore your previous experience and go into the moment. Be Here Now. See what there is to work with right now in creating yourself anew. Life is an ongoing, never-ending process of re-creation.

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.

I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.

I'm going to dress a little different. Those frilly dresses I used to wear on stage, that was the old me.

I went from staring at the same four walls for 21 years to seeing the whole world in just 12 months.