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It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.

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
Actually
Doe
Persons
Person
Kind
Never
Persuasive
Argue
Arguing

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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The secret is that there is no secret.
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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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For the living, death is thievery.
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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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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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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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water.
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I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
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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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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
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.
Lionel Shriver