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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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Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
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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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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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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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Time itself made all things rare.
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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.
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Change is like that: you are no longer where you were you are not yet where you will get you are nowhere exactly.
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Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.
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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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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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The secret is that there is no secret.
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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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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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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Lionel Shriver
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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
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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.
Lionel Shriver