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...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.

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
Men
Describes
Doomed
Whenever
Sweet
Woman

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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I first foreswore motherhood when I was about eight years old. ... [Children] were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. As an eight-year-old, maybe I was simply mortified by the prospect of being saddled with myself.
Lionel Shriver
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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
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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
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.
Lionel Shriver
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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Lionel Shriver
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So many stories are determined before they start.
Lionel Shriver
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I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear.
Lionel Shriver
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How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
Lionel Shriver
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We are not attracted to people because they are virtuous. In fact, there's something a little creepy about people who are too good. There is a big draw to people who are successful at breaking the rules. That means we end up admiring a lot of people that we think we shouldn't.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
Lionel Shriver
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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 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
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The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.
Lionel Shriver
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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.
Lionel Shriver