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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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Lionel Shriver
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 18
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Gastonia
North Carolina
Margaret Ann Shriver
Margaret Shriver
Feel
Either
Grasp
Feels
Year
Adult
Real
Future
Concept
Even
Pain
Throw
Much
Death
Concepts
Years
Away
Adults
People
Makes
Exist
Doesn
Easier
Eleven

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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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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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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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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For the living, death is thievery.
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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.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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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.
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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
Lionel Shriver