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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
Country
Son
Dwells
Eternity
Transcendent
Single
Earthly
Boys
Sons
Particular
Everlasting
Hell
Grand
Tawdry
Idea
Triumph
Malignant
Ideas
Countries
Conceptual
More quotes by Lionel Shriver
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
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.
Lionel Shriver
Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Lionel Shriver
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
[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.
Lionel Shriver
But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
A boy is a dangerous animal.
Lionel Shriver
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
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
My own apathy is bone chilling.
Lionel Shriver
Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
Lionel Shriver
it is always difficult to impress the ignorant.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
The most sumptuous experience of ingestion is in-between: remembering the last bite and looking forward to the next one.
Lionel Shriver
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
Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Lionel Shriver
How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
Lionel Shriver
It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.
Lionel Shriver
I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.
Lionel Shriver
For the living, death is thievery.
Lionel Shriver
