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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
Emotion
Quite
Matter
Different
Always
Discomfort
Rhetoric
Uncomfortable

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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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.
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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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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.
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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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[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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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.
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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
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I have never in all my life considered you other people.
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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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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
Lionel Shriver
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
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For the living, death is thievery.
Lionel Shriver
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My own apathy is bone chilling.
Lionel Shriver
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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
Lionel Shriver