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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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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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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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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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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
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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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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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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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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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Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.
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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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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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Time itself made all things rare.
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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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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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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The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
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For the living, death is thievery.
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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