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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
Rhetoric
Uncomfortable
Emotion
Quite
Matter
Different
Always
Discomfort

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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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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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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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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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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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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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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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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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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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
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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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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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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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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.
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I have never in all my life considered you other people.
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So many stories are determined before they start.
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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
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