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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
Things
Eight
Saddled
Simply
Mortified
Maybe
Sneaky
Year
Prospect
Firsts
Annoying
First
Motherhood
Children
Loud
Years
Broke

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.
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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.
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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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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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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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[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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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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We are not attracted to people because they are virtuous. In fact, there's something a little creepy about people who are too good. There is a big draw to people who are successful at breaking the rules. That means we end up admiring a lot of people that we think we shouldn't.
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So many stories are determined before they start.
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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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.
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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 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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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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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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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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