Quote

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

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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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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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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.
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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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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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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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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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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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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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.
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I have never in all my life considered you other people.
Lionel Shriver
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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
Lionel Shriver
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So many stories are determined before they start.
Lionel Shriver