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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

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
Awkward
Essentially
Existence
People

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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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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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We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.
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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.
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The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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So many stories are determined before they start.
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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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Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.
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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.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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 am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
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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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We are not attracted to people because they are virtuous. In fact, there's something a little creepy about people who are too good. There is a big draw to people who are successful at breaking the rules. That means we end up admiring a lot of people that we think we shouldn't.
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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.
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