Quote

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
Child
Neurotic
Term
Affliction
Mother
Exceptional
Thought
Mothers
Degeneracy
Must
Distinction
Pediatrician
Children
Latter
Craved
Terms
Deficiency
Civilization
Conceive

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So many stories are determined before they start.
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The secret is that there is no secret.
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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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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.
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
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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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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.
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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
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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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Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
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The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
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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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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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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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I have never in all my life considered you other people.
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