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I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

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
Feign
Vanities
Vanity
Vain

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
Lionel Shriver
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The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.
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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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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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But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.
Lionel Shriver
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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
Lionel Shriver
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
Lionel Shriver
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The secret is that there is no secret.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
Lionel Shriver
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Time itself made all things rare.
Lionel Shriver
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
Lionel Shriver
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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver