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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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Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
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Time itself made all things rare.
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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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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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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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The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
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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.
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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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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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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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Lionel Shriver
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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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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
Lionel Shriver
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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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