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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.

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
Used
Anything
Adaptation
People
Attachment
Step
Short
Seem
Steps
Seems

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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.
Lionel Shriver
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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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For the living, death is thievery.
Lionel Shriver
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver