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Lionel Shriver Quotes
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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.
Lionel Shriver
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Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
Lionel Shriver
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I was suffering from the delusion that it's the thought that counts.
Lionel Shriver
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The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.
Lionel Shriver
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Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.
Lionel Shriver
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Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.
Lionel Shriver
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It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.
Lionel Shriver
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The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.
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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Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better.
Lionel Shriver
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In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
Lionel Shriver
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But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
Lionel Shriver
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It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.
Lionel Shriver
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I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
Lionel Shriver
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Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.
Lionel Shriver
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Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
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Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
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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You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
Lionel Shriver
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Hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.
Lionel Shriver
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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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I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
Lionel Shriver
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Quote of the day
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Lionel Shriver
Born:
May 18, 1957
(age 66)
Bio:
Lionel Shriver is an American journalist and author who is resident in the United Kingdom.
Known for:
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)
The Mandibles (2016)
So Much for That (2010)
The Post-Birthday World (2007)
Big Brother (2013)
Most used words:
life
people
drunk
answer
Lionel Shriver on Wikipedia
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