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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.
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
Must
Distinction
Pediatrician
Children
Latter
Craved
Terms
Deficiency
Civilization
Conceive
Child
Neurotic
Term
Affliction
Mother
Exceptional
Thought
Mothers
Degeneracy
More quotes by Lionel Shriver
Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
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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.
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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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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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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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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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For the living, death is thievery.
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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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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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
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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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Time itself made all things rare.
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The secret is that there is no secret.
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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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The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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