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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

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
Always
Discomfort
Rhetoric
Uncomfortable
Emotion
Quite
Matter
Different

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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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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The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
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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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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.
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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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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
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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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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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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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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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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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For the living, death is thievery.
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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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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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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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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