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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

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For the living, death is thievery.
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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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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.
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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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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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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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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Time itself made all things rare.
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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
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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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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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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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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
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