Quote

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.

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
Painful
Wouldn
Synonym
Term
Discomfort
Though
Assured
Experience
Agony
Seems
Beloved
Might
Medical
Profession

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No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.
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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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 most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
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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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So many stories are determined before they start.
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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 am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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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.
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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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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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Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
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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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I have never in all my life considered you other people.
Lionel Shriver
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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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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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel Shriver