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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
Followed
Rules
Failing
Mother
Ends
Always
Failings

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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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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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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 secret is that there is no secret.
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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For the living, death is thievery.
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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.
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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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Time itself made all things rare.
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We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.
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We are not attracted to people because they are virtuous. In fact, there's something a little creepy about people who are too good. There is a big draw to people who are successful at breaking the rules. That means we end up admiring a lot of people that we think we shouldn't.
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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
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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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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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I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
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So many stories are determined before they start.
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