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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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Lionel Shriver
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 18
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Gastonia
North Carolina
Margaret Ann Shriver
Margaret Shriver
Materialism
People
Jealousy
Hung
Second
Whether
Really
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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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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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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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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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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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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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
Lionel Shriver
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
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Time itself made all things rare.
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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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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When Mexico enjoys an economic boom while the U.S. is in dire fiscal straights, it seemed perfectly credible that Mexico would not roll out the welcome mat for unemployed Americans.
Lionel Shriver
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
Lionel Shriver
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In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.
Lionel Shriver
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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
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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The secret is that there is no secret.
Lionel Shriver