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b6bcd69
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There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.
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Michael Chabon |
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dbc107d
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Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.
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Michael Chabon |
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0b9f6c8
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In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.
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Michael Chabon |
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94cb42d
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The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
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Michael Chabon |
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4ca58fa
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Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.
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Michael Chabon |
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0e97fb1
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It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.
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Michael Chabon |
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7b89d7d
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Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't."
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Michael Chabon |
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a35f1e9
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The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit..
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Michael Chabon |
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490a1b2
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They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other
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Michael Chabon |
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5cb9ad6
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We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place...
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Michael Chabon |
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f3a5585
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When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness - and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not t..
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Michael Chabon |
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422bb4c
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Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.
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Michael Chabon |
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21b5972
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The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost..
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magic
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Michael Chabon |
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72dadaa
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As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be..
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Michael Chabon |
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cf318dc
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I knew that I shouldn't have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.
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Michael Chabon |
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d57520e
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The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.
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Michael Chabon |
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6509d31
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I don't mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.
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Michael Chabon |
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9ad185f
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Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.
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Michael Chabon |
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10072e0
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Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
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Michael Chabon |
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f590189
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Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!
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Michael Chabon |
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a25c9e3
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My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.
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parenting
parent
mother
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Michael Chabon |
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cfaa18d
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No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
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Michael Chabon |
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03b297a
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It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.
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family
thanksgiving
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Michael Chabon |
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e854816
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I'd spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.
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Michael Chabon |
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ca7595d
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As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.
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Michael Chabon |
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309a44c
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I said, "I need to hear something that's going to save my life." Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox. "
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Michael Chabon |
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f5b0761
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Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.
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Michael Chabon |
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c9e5baf
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He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.
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Michael Chabon |
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19f5e10
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Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.
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imagination
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Michael Chabon |
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32998e7
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He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.
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Michael Chabon |
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65da410
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My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.
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Michael Chabon |
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207a4b7
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Sooner or later, you will discover which kind of father you are, and at that moment you will, with perfect horror, recognize the type. You are the kind of father who fakes it, who yells, who measures his children with greatest accuracy only against one another, who evades the uncomfortable and glosses over the painful and pads the historic records of his sorrows and accomplishments alike. You are the kind who teases and deceives and toys wi..
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Michael Chabon |
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b6a5fe7
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All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.
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Michael Chabon |
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4bdb93d
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Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.
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Michael Chabon |
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c6931af
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A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic. Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. Not in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and parings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag. Not in astrology, theosophy, chiromancy, dowsing rods, seances, weeping statues, werewolves, wonders, or miracles. What be..
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Michael Chabon |
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82f8edd
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I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."
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identity
religion
self-reliance
nationality
home
jewish
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Michael Chabon |
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4769a26
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Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party appa..
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writing
truth
self-revelation
revelation
secrets
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Michael Chabon |
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49995dd
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We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange co..
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communality
clichés
obscurity
experience
children
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Michael Chabon |
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8ffac9e
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But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.
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Michael Chabon |
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ad7f03f
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There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.
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Michael Chabon |
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45d91cd
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Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe- a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a contain..
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sex
marriage
love
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Michael Chabon |
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639b956
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Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.
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Michael Chabon |
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f332b8a
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It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim--even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon--feels like a person lying in a s..
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Michael Chabon |
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a0f4320
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It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster.
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Michael Chabon |