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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.

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
Books
Away
Book
Siphoned
Children
Messed
Writing
Ungrateful
Much
Apartment
Would
Precious
Time
Main

More quotes by 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.
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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.
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Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
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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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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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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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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.
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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.
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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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Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
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That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
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The secret is that there is no secret.
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My own apathy is bone chilling.
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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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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
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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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Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
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