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Lionel Shriver Quotes about Lying

All Lionel Shriver Quotes Age Apathy Children Country Lying quotes
Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.

Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.

Lionel Shriver
Lying, Inspiration, Years

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

Lionel Shriver
Lying, Liars, Successful
Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.175, Counterpoint Press

A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship, it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help.

Lionel Shriver
Lying, Successful, World
Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.175, Counterpoint Press

Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison. "Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive.

Lionel Shriver
Lying, Parent, Little Sister

Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.

Lionel Shriver
Lying, Reading, Elude You

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