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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

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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I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
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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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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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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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Time itself made all things rare.
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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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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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I have never in all my life considered you other people.
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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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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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So many stories are determined before they start.
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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 most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
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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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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver
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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
Lionel Shriver
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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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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.
Lionel Shriver