QuoteProject
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
ShareWTF𝕏

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

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
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

The only proof for the existence of God is that without God you couldn't prove anything.
Cornelius Van TilRead
The whole drama of the world is such tragedy that I am weary of the spectacle.
John AdamsRead
If people dying as a consequence of the implementation of measures cannot count as evidence that the legislation has detrimental effects, what would?
Mark FisherRead
Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.
Walter BenjaminRead
Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others-misfortu ne is not a mortgage on achievement-fai lure is not a mortgage on success-sufferi ng is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence-man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar nor for anyone’s cause-life is not one huge hospital.
Ayn RandRead
Life is God's novel. Let him write it.
Isaac Bashevis SingerRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.