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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
Great
Seductive
Time
Killer
Killers
Productivity
Passive
Replaced
Illusion
Television
Conspicuously

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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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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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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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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Change is like that: you are no longer where you were you are not yet where you will get you are nowhere exactly.
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Time itself made all things rare.
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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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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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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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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.
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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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So many stories are determined before they start.
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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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We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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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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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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