Lionel Shriver Quotes

The good life doesn't knock on the door.
Joy is a job.

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They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.

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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.

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Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?

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

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Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt.

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Time itself made all things rare.

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Time hangs off me like molting skin.

3863

Having buck teeth in junior high,” she rounded up unsteadily, “must
be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb
shock. It’s like, what’s going on? Why doesn’t anyone smile at me at
checkout anymore? But it won’t be a shock for me. It’ll be, oh that. That
again. Teeth.

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Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

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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.

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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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I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side of something only in a temporal sense.

3842

I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattainable than sulking in passive, cynical resignation that hell is other people you're related to.

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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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The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

4847

At only ten a.m., Edgar found himself already eyeing the Doritos on the counter. One thing he hadn't anticipated about the 'home office' was Snack Syndrome; lately his mental energies divided evenly between his new calling (worrying about money, which substituted neatly for earning it) and not stuffing his face.

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