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

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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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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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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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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
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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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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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 boy is a dangerous animal.
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For the living, death is thievery.
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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
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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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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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