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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

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
Rules
Failing
Mother
Ends
Always
Failings
Followed

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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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The secret is that there is no secret.
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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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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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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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Time itself made all things rare.
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Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.
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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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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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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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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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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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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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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.
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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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So many stories are determined before they start.
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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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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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