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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
Hell
Grand
Tawdry
Idea
Triumph
Malignant
Ideas
Countries
Conceptual
Country
Son
Dwells
Eternity
Transcendent
Single
Earthly
Boys
Sons
Particular
Everlasting

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
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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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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
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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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Time itself made all things rare.
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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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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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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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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
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For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it.
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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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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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For the living, death is thievery.
Lionel Shriver
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
Lionel Shriver
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
Lionel Shriver