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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.

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
Stories
Mortified
Hopelessly
Prospect
Trapped
Becoming
Story
Else
Someone

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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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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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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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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So many stories are determined before they start.
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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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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The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
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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.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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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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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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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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.
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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