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Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.

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
Taste
Earthly
Courage
Tastes
Takes
Presents
Since
Clue
Anyone
Serves
Backfire
Anything
Betray
Conspicuously
Many
Odds
Benefactor
Giving
Gift
Benefactors

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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For the living, death is thievery.
Lionel Shriver
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The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
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No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.
Lionel Shriver
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It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
Lionel Shriver
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I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.
Lionel Shriver
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I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
Lionel Shriver
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
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The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.
Lionel Shriver
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The secret is that there is no secret.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
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Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.
Lionel Shriver
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Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.
Lionel Shriver
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A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.
Lionel Shriver
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver