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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
Feels
Year
Adult
Real
Future
Concept
Even
Pain
Throw
Much
Death
Concepts
Years
Away
Adults
People
Makes
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Doesn
Easier
Eleven
Feel
Either
Grasp

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old. ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself.
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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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.
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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.
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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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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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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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.
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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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The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.
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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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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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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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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver