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Desire is one of the burning experiences of human life.

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
Humans
Life
Burning
Experiences
Desire
Human

More quotes by Lionel Shriver

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Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat
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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
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People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
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Change is like that: you are no longer where you were you are not yet where you will get you are nowhere exactly.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
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Time itself made all things rare.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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.
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Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.
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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Notoriety is cheap. It's just easier to get noticed by doing something bad.
Lionel Shriver