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b5dfd61
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A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.
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lazy
soul
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Michel Faber |
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0fea7a1
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Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.
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society
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Michel Faber |
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e43b6f1
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The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.
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past
regret
memory
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Michel Faber |
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edc70fc
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Most true things are kind of corny, don't you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.
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true
embarrassment
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Michel Faber |
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5f47563
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Shared suffering, she'd found, was no guarantee of intimacy.
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Michel Faber |
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1f94e51
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Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? And then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten year..
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life
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Michel Faber |
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4361e88
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History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.
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Michel Faber |
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ecb7984
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Why are there such long words in the world, Miss?' enquires Sophie, when the mineralogy lesson is over. 'One long difficult word is the same as a whole sentence full of short easy ones, Sophie,' says Sugar. 'It saves time and paper.' Seeing that the child is unconvinced, she adds, 'If books were written in such a way that every person, no matter how young, could understand everything in them, they would be enormously long books. Would you w..
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Michel Faber |
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cb3451d
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Isn't Heaven reward enough, without needing to see the damned punished?
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Michel Faber |
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7ff8dfc
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Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.
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relationship
love
intimacy
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Michel Faber |
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e58bbba
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Peter..." She let her head fall back against the seat and sighed. "Let's not go there." "That's what people always say about places where they already are."
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places-already-are
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Michel Faber |
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705d181
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Sugar leans her chin against the knuckles of the hand that holds the pen. Glistening on the page between her silk-shrouded elbows lies an unfinished sentence. The heroine of her novel has just slashed the throat of a man. The problem is how, precisely, the blood will flow. Flow is too gentle a word; spill implies carelessness; spurt is out of the question because she has used the word already, in another context, a few lines earlier. Pour o..
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Michel Faber |
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30d939f
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Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.
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Michel Faber |
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e7978c6
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Peter was struck by the scar's essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.
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scars
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Michel Faber |
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822ee5e
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But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.
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marriage
faith
religion
miracles
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Michel Faber |
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d10c073
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Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks." "You might not think so if you were a duck."
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human-beings
suffer
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Michel Faber |
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d4f6fc9
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Yes, seven years old she was, when she finally plucked up the courage to ask her mother what Christmas was all about, and Mrs Castaway replied (once only, after which the subject was forever forbidden): 'It's the day Jesus Christ died for our sins. Evidently unsuccessfully, since we're still paying for them.
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Michel Faber |
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48facb5
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These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.
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intertwined
invasion
secrecy
secretive
shadowy
monopoly
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Michel Faber |
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037439e
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The word troubled her, though. 'Indispensable.' It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.
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Michel Faber |
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cbcbc50
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I just wish," she said, "that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck." --
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Michel Faber |
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e9e3e18
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Sunlight is bad,' he wheezes. 'It's the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers' legs. And when there's no war on, it fades wallpaper.
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Michel Faber |
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a584bd0
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she and they were all the same under the skin, weren't they?
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Michel Faber |
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f1300a3
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She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong.
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Michel Faber |
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0335e81
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The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.
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past
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Michel Faber |
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aa68e94
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Clothes are nothing more than a fig leaf. And the bodies beneath are just another layer of clothing, an outfit of flesh with an impractically thin leather exterior, in various shades of pink, yellow and brown. The souls alone are real. Seen in this way, there can never be any such thing as social unease or shyness or embarrassment. All you need do is greet your fellow soul.
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embarrassment
shyness
soul
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Michel Faber |
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164abbb
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A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong.
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Michel Faber |
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c27b6f6
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In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, the couldn't mesnishtil,they had no concept of slan.
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Michel Faber |
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bed0634
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Falling in love: how does it work? Over the years we gather the odd clue, but nothing adds up. We'd like to think we have a picture of our future partner projected in our mind, all their qualities recorded as if on film, and we just search the planet for that person until we find them, sitting in Casablanca waiting to be recognised. But in reality our love lives are blown around by career and coincidence, not to mention lack of nerve on giv..
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innamoramento
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Michel Faber |
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cbb3422
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Without you at my side, I feel as though my eyes are just a camera, like a closed-circuit camera without film in it, registering what's out there, second by second, letting it all vanish instantly to be replaced by more images, none of them properly appreciated.
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Michel Faber |
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9bd7b4b
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You know,' Amlis went on, 'Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.' His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. 'It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn't believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As..
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Michel Faber |
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5b0cc6c
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Because I must do something while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious.
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Michel Faber |
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b4f4344
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She talks about being a Christian as if it's a gym membership you can sign up for.
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gym-membership
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Michel Faber |
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384c7a0
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Strange how a specimen like him, well cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mer..
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Michel Faber |
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46f319e
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How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he'd been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn't spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.
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services
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Michel Faber |
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d7bd4e9
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There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT.
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emergency
red-button
wall
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Michel Faber |
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724427e
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This is a street where the weaker souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake listening to the rats.
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Michel Faber |
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822437e
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to her, all familiar responses smell of entrapment. Sharing an old joke, singing an old song - these are admissions of defeat, of being satisfied with one's lot. In the sky, the Fates are watching, and when they hear such things, they murmur amongst themselves: Ah yes, that one is quite content as she is; changing her lot would only confuse her.
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Michel Faber |
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ddc5283
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The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.
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Michel Faber |
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2517ce6
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They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.
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Michel Faber |
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e996c45
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There is so little in the New Testament about sexual love, and most of it consists of Paul heaving a deep sigh and tolerating it like a weakness.
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sexual-love
tolerating
weakness
paul
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Michel Faber |
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44fd9c5
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That was the sort of thing crazy people did--instinctively choosing the experiences that confirmed their own negative attitudes.
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Michel Faber |
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f14e25d
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Needs could not bully her.
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Michel Faber |
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6c9a53d
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God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation.
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Michel Faber |
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128aaf0
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The highway looked different to him now, as they drove on. In theory it was the same stretch of tarmac, bounded by the same traffic paraphernalia and flimsy metal fences, but it had been transformed by their own intent. It was no longer a straight line to an airport, it was a mysterious hinterland of shadowy detours and hidey-holes. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's a..
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Michel Faber |