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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
Writing
Ungrateful
Much
Apartment
Would
Precious
Time
Main
Books
Away
Book
Siphoned
Children
Messed
More quotes by Lionel Shriver
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
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Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.
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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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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
For the living, death is thievery.
Lionel Shriver
Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
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
...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.
Lionel Shriver
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.
Lionel Shriver
Time itself made all things rare.
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
...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.
Lionel Shriver
Secrets bind and separate in strict accordance with who's in them .
Lionel Shriver
My own apathy is bone chilling.
Lionel Shriver
Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
Lionel Shriver
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel Shriver
