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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
Giving
Gift
Benefactors
Taste
Earthly
Courage
Tastes
Takes
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Anyone
Serves
Backfire
Anything
Betray
Conspicuously
Many
Odds
Benefactor
More quotes by Lionel Shriver
People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver
When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear.
Lionel Shriver
Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
Lionel Shriver
Time itself made all things rare.
Lionel Shriver
Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
Lionel Shriver
Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Lionel Shriver
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
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
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
How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
Lionel Shriver
Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
Lionel Shriver
The secret is that there is no secret.
Lionel Shriver
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
Lionel Shriver
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
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
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
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
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
I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
Lionel Shriver
