We Need To Talk About Kevin Quotes
"My tales were exotic imports, from Lisbon, from Katmandu. But no one wants to hear stories from abroad, really."
"What a more considerable achievement, to root around in the untransubstantiated rubbish of plain old New York state."
"I seem finally to be learning what you were always trying to teach me, that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria."
"I see now what they mean by 'holding your head high,' and I am sometimes surprised by how much interior transformation a ramrod posture can afford."
"I'm so tired of this. It's not that I have no shame. Rather, I'm exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint."
"I've opted to remain in Gladstone, after kicking up such a fuss about moving to the suburbs in the first place."
"It's not that I want my neighbors to forget who I am; I want to, and that is not an opportunity any town affords."
"Everything here is precarious. Everything feels like it might simply blink out like a bad idea."
"What I would give now to return to the days when I'd no idea what lay in wait."
"Even the carelessness with which I abandoned my native land was classically of a piece with our nosy, restless, aggressive people."
"It's embarrassing to pick your life partner according to what television shows he watched as a child."
"Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me."
"I often have a nagging sensation of waiting for something."
"You can't imagine that you'll feel better if you win, do you?"
"I was deprived that cliched cinematic tip-off of heaving over the toilet."
"I have experienced my share of burning sexual desire, and I can assure you that this was an urgency of another order."
"In the very instant of his birth, I associated Kevin with my own limitations."
"I never did quite get the hang of the expressing pump, though it was sweet of you to go out and buy that hospital-grade Medela."
"In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting."
"You only get to sit like an adult if you act like one."
"I have a theory about Dream Homes. Not for nothing does 'folly' mean both foolhardy mistake and costly ornamental building."
"I want to get away from Kevin the better to confide to you how very much more time I planned to spend with him."
"Never is the object of your attentions innately dull or compelling. Nothing is interesting if you are not interested."
"I could not shut you and Kevin from my mind. That I missed you fiercely served as an aching reminder that I had been missing you since Kevin was born."
"I'm afraid my intentions came out as defiant: Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, if you think I'm such a rotten mother."
"Privately I concluded that the explanation wasn't so much your different aesthetic, or lack of one; it's just that you were very suggestible."
"I'm better familiar with the real estate scarcity in the area now, so I trust that every other available property you looked at was plain hideous. Which this place was not."
"But from the instant he was laid on my breast I perceived Kevin Khatchadourian as pre-extant, with a vast, fluctuating interior life whose subtlety and intensity would if anything diminish with age."
"I'd furnished it with secondhand sofas whose floral upholstery was faded and frayed, garage-sale drapes with tasseled tiebacks, ornate mahogany sideboards with speckled-looking glass."
"Herb and Gladys built their own house, smoked their own salmon, brewed their own beer."
"Your mother cooked with the precision of a chemist."
"Sitting before the fire, drinking the beer, were afterthoughts."
"They didn't read; there were a few books, but the only well-leafed volumes were instruction manuals."
"They're big on life's mechanics; they know how to get its cogs to interlock."
"Life is a collection of cells and electrical pulses to him, it is material."
"Violence only teaches a child that physical force is an acceptable method of getting your way."
"By merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use."
"He's a murderer. It's marvelously unambiguous."
"A baby is a baby, each miraculous in its way, but to demand transformation on the instant of delivery was to place too great a burden on a small confused bundle and an exhausted middle-aged mother both."
"I am amazed when I drop a glove in the street and a teenager runs two blocks to return it."
"In Kevin, the note was the shrill high pitch of a rape whistle, the color was a pulsing, aortal red, and the feeling was fury."
"The only interest he displayed in the book was when I left him alone with it to get dinner, only to find that he'd scribbled Magic Marker on every page—an early interactive edition, it seems."
"It's not as if Kevin didn't have things in abundance, since you showered him with toys."
"In fact, though I fear that my martial metaphor may seem provocative, when I carried Celia over our threshold I had the exhilarating impression of having reset our troop strengths at a healthy par."
"Maybe my love for Celia was too easy. Maybe in my own terms she was a kind of cheating, since my whole life I had striven to surmount difficulty, to overcome terrors."
"But it is only natural for the current of emotion to follow the path of least resistance."
"Kevin was hard to love in the same manner that it was hard to eat well in Moscow, find a cheap place to stay in London, or locate a commercial Laundromat in Bangkok."
"I may have been the first mother in history to despair that her baby didn't cry enough."
"The newer animals were only allowed in her bedtime embrace once they had proved themselves by losing an ear or had joined the fallible, mortal world with a baptismal stain of strained broccoli."
"To my amazement, when I put Celia down she slept; I guess we were indeed raising 'a doormat.'"
"For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul."
"Of what a variety of dreadful textures or murky corners might she have been terrified and quietly faced down by herself?"
"Celia was not clingy. She was simply affectionate."
"Kevin's papers always follow the assignment excessively to the letter; he adds nothing."
"Destruction may be motivated by nothing more complicated than acquisitiveness, a kind of ham-handed, misguided greed."
"Kevin didn't want to have to answer your Big Question, Franklin. He wanted an answer from you."
"To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay."
"Both of us were lapsed, so it made sense to raise our kids as neither Armenian Orthodox nor Presbyterian."
"It means you'll spend twenty-five grand to kid yourself you're still nineteen, and still not get any trunk space."
"The Luna doesn't copy the original, it alludes to the original."
"This is what it's like to be Kevin all the time."
"Well, I guess I do tire of all this retro-boomer stuff."
"But it's nice to have holidays, isn't it? To make part of the year a little different, something to look forward to."
"I do. Still, that slit up the thigh is cut pretty high. You don't want to make him uneasy."
"The only thing Americans do that doesn't work out too great has to be somebody else's fault."
"You wake up, you watch TV, and you get in the car and you listen to the radio. You go to your little job or your little school, but you're not going to hear about that on the 6:00 news."
"People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species."
"Everything Americans do that doesn't work out too great has to be somebody else's fault."
"I've made a study of it: Pretty much the definition of something happening is it's bad."
"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."
"I give good story. It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it."
"What's the main perk of taking the rap. You and your cameramen here leech off my accomplishments."
"You want my plot. I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way."
"When you're putting on a show, you don't shoot the audience."
"You killed eleven people. My husband. My daughter. Look me in the eye, and tell me why."
"It's just that I had to tell you that story in order that you better understand the next one."
"I love my son. He has five grim years left to serve in an adult penitentiary, and I cannot vouch for what will walk out the other side."
"The truth is, if I decided I was innocent, or I decided I was guilty, what difference would it make?"
"I'm simply reiterating a sequence of events strung together by Newsweek."
"Big deeds are a lot of little deeds one after the other."
"There are only people and what happens to them."