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The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

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
Time
Killer
Killers
Productivity
Passive
Replaced
Illusion
Television
Conspicuously
Great
Seductive

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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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.
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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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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I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.
Lionel Shriver
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
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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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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
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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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[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
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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Lionel Shriver
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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
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The secret is that there is no secret.
Lionel Shriver
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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
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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
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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
Lionel Shriver
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I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver