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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
Years
Broke
Things
Eight
Saddled
Simply
Mortified
Maybe
Sneaky
Year
Prospect
Firsts
Annoying
First
Motherhood
Children
Loud
More quotes by Lionel Shriver
[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.
Lionel Shriver
For the living, death is thievery.
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
Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Lionel Shriver
Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Lionel Shriver
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
Lionel Shriver
Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
Lionel Shriver
...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
Lionel Shriver
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
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
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.
Lionel Shriver
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
Lionel Shriver
Change is like that: you are no longer where you were you are not yet where you will get you are nowhere exactly.
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
I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
