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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.
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
Maybe
Sneaky
Year
Prospect
Firsts
Annoying
First
Motherhood
Children
Loud
Years
Broke
Things
Eight
Saddled
Simply
Mortified
More quotes by Lionel Shriver
Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
Lionel Shriver
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
A boy is a dangerous animal.
Lionel Shriver
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
Lionel Shriver
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
I have never in all my life considered you other people.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.
Lionel Shriver
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
Lionel Shriver
Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
Lionel Shriver
It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.
Lionel Shriver
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
Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.
Lionel Shriver