Quote

...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.

Lionel Shriver

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Lionel Shriver
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 18
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Gastonia
North Carolina
Margaret Ann Shriver
Margaret Shriver
Really
Subject
Good
Conscience
Sever
Think
Subjects
Frustrate
Thinking
Already
Attachments
Life
Bits
Punish
People
Worry
Anguish
Littles
Attachment
Little
Hopes

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.
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It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.
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For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it.
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The secret is that there is no secret.
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old. ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself.
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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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Besides, I'd heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.
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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Lionel Shriver
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
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[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.
Lionel Shriver
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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver