Quote

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

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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My own apathy is bone chilling.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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 have never in all my life considered you other people.
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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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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.
Lionel Shriver
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...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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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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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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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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
Lionel Shriver
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But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.
Lionel Shriver
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So many stories are determined before they start.
Lionel Shriver
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The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
Lionel Shriver
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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver