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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
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Adult
Real
Future
Concept
Even
Pain
Throw
Much
Death
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Away
Adults
People
Makes
Exist
Doesn
Easier
Eleven
Feel
Either
Grasp
More quotes by Lionel Shriver
Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.
Lionel Shriver
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
...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
Lionel Shriver
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
...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
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
[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
I have never in all my life considered you other people.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
Lionel Shriver
Change is like that: you are no longer where you were you are not yet where you will get you are nowhere exactly.
Lionel Shriver
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
Lionel Shriver
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
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
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
Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Lionel Shriver
So many stories are determined before they start.
Lionel Shriver
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
