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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

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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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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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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.
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it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
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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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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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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear.
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So many stories are determined before they start.
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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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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 have never in all my life considered you other people.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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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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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The secret is that there is no secret.
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver