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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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Lionel Shriver
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 18
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Gastonia
North Carolina
Margaret Ann Shriver
Margaret Shriver
Afraid
Terrible
Fear
Comes
Badness
Enough
Belly
Thing
Release
Long
Something
Pass

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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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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Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.
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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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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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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For the living, death is thievery.
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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
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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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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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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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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
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I have never in all my life considered you other people.
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The secret is that there is no secret.
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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