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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.

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
Made
Pisses
Perfectionist
Stuff
Great
Work

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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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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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
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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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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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I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.
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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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.
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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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[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.
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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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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.
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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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A boy is a dangerous animal.
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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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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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