Lionel Shriver Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I was 17 when I was forced into marriage. I had no hand in it, and I didn't even enjoy being with the man. Also, I wanted to study, but no one listened to me. I wanted to move forward in life, it wasn't a happy situation. Because of some family problems, I had to stick around.
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Let me tell you something - being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless and it is always transitory.
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Life's a bit like mountaineering - never look down.
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People place such importance on the external. It's disgusting.
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The only thing I'd ever wanted in my life was to be a major-league ballplayer, but I had to admit to myself that I wasn't good enough. It broke my heart.
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All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.
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When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
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I suffer from low self-esteem. I had horrible self-esteem growing up. You really have to save yourself because the critic within you will eat you up. It's not the outside world - it's your interior life, that critic within you, that you have to silence.
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The thing is, I live a very public life, and I have to keep things personal, or else I have no personal life. It's very difficult.
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But I'm trying to play into this role as much as possible and be a nicer person in real life.
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I think magazines and interviews make celebrities into this bigger-than-life thing, but I've gotten bullied over trying different things with my makeup.
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My wife and I are very blessed. I am very grateful for the life that we lead.
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In this world, you can choose to be positive, or you can choose to be negative. You can choose to see things through a set of eyes that sees good, or you can choose to see things in life that aren't so good.
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Life is one long jubilee.
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Life would be very dreary if there were no magic. If the real world were only that veil of tears, I just don't think could get up in the morning.
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It's true: I don't remember what life was like before parenthood.
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It's hard to strike that balance: to tell a kid that life isn't fair, but also recognize and enforce in them the reality that their choices matter.
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I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.
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Women and men look at their life, and women say, 'What do I need? Do I need more money, or do I need more time?' And women are intelligent enough to say, 'I need more time.' And so, women lead balanced lives; men should be learning from women.
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Individual courage is the only interesting thing in life.
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The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.
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I assure you my professions never go beyond my intentions.
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I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.
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Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity.
