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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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Lionel Shriver
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 18
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Gastonia
North Carolina
Margaret Ann Shriver
Margaret Shriver
Idea
Triumph
Malignant
Ideas
Countries
Conceptual
Country
Son
Dwells
Eternity
Transcendent
Single
Earthly
Boys
Sons
Particular
Everlasting
Hell
Grand
Tawdry

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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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[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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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.
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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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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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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
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It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.
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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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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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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 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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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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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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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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When Mexico enjoys an economic boom while the U.S. is in dire fiscal straights, it seemed perfectly credible that Mexico would not roll out the welcome mat for unemployed Americans.
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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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