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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

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
High
Unformed
Expectations
Dangerous

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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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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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 was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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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For the living, death is thievery.
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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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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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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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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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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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Change is like that: you are no longer where you were you are not yet where you will get you are nowhere exactly.
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Time itself made all things rare.
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
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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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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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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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