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3afcbf8
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We should torture language to tell the truth.
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torture
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Rachel Kushner |
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157c27d
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Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.
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Rachel Kushner |
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67b760c
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It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt.
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Rachel Kushner |
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55d2876
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And if someone did remember them, someone besides me, that person's account would make them less real, because my memory of them would have to be corrected by facts, which are never considerate of what makes an impression, what stays in the mind after all these years, the very real images that grip me from the erased past and won't let go.
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Rachel Kushner |
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87d4f4f
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You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.
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Rachel Kushner |
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cd20e6a
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I was not likely to join a cult. That was not the danger I felt in glimpsing the feet of the dead, the bucket from which they drank. It was the proven fact, in the photographed feet, that you could drink death and join it.
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Rachel Kushner |
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85d2a52
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I trusted the need for risk, the importance of honoring it.
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Rachel Kushner |
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1d64084
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At the end of Th Brother's K, Alyosha asks the children to always remember the good feeling they share, in praising and celebrating the life of their beloved dead friend, the lost child. Remember this always, Alyosha says, and he means, as an antidote. Retain the innocence of the most wholesome feeling you ever had in your life. Part of you stays innocent forever. That part of you is worth more than the rest.
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Rachel Kushner |
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1f43903
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it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone.
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people
likability
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Rachel Kushner |
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76d495d
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But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren't an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.
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Rachel Kushner |
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7a84774
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When I was little, skiing in the Sierras, I felt that I was drawing on the mountain's face, making big sweeping graceful lines. That was how I had started to draw, I'd told Sandro, as a little girl, five, six years old, on skis. Later, when drawing became a habit, a way of being, of marking time, I always thought of skiing.
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Rachel Kushner |
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e02b370
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Save your freedom for a rainy day," someone had written on the bathroom wall at Rudy's Bar in SoHo,"
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Rachel Kushner |
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48e8e7d
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The thing about songwriting," John Dogg was saying to someone, "is that you can address things obliquely, but no matter. You can't get away from the content that is the essence of the form. All songs are about unrequited love." "Except 'Green Onions,' " Ronnie said. "Which isn't about love at all."
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Rachel Kushner |
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3f15510
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Later, Giddle's response when I told her I was in love: "Oh God, I'm so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it's so disappointing. But good luck with that.")"
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Rachel Kushner |
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773d4e0
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When I was twelve, Flip came through Reno and gave out autographs at a casino. I didn't have a glossy photo for him to sign, so I had him sign my hand. For weeks I took a shower with a plastic bag over that hand, rubbed-banded at the wrist. It wasn't quite a romantic infatuation. There are levels of readiness. Young girls don't entertain the idea of sex, their body and another's together. That comes later, but there isn't nothing before it...
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Rachel Kushner |
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06a692c
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I remember a rainbow spectrum of men's wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dresses in uniforms of one sort or another, and these shoes were for pimps.
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Rachel Kushner |
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a56cc8e
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She always had that empty look. ... It's a particular blankness, and I've mostly seen it on billboards for so-called gentlemen's clubs. The convincing ones have that same empty look. Like they know just how to void themselves and not get in the way of some "gentleman's" fantasy."
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Rachel Kushner |
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ab61360
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Sometimes what other people want is wantable, briefly, before dissolving in the face of your own wants.
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Rachel Kushner |
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8bc6f0b
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If you'd showered you had a competitive edge at the Mars Room. If
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Rachel Kushner |
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648bb25
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Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it.
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waiting
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Rachel Kushner |
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cb295d6
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I witnessed doom, though. It was around me. But at the time, I thought the bad luck of other people reaffirmed that I was doing okay.
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Rachel Kushner |
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f2f9d8f
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his ridiculousness was a form of vitality.
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Rachel Kushner |
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5c2340a
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Den ton eikha philesei alla exera oti tha ginotan ki auto, kai to exere oti to exera, kai uperkhe kati san amoibaia khara se toute ten olisthese pros to anapodrasto, ki as men exera to onoma tou e an o,tidepote apo osa elege etan aletheia.
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kiss
love
inevitable
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Rachel Kushner |
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c788826
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It wasn't quite a romantic infatuation. There are levels of readiness. Young girls don't entertain the idea of sex, their body and another's together. That comes later, but there isn't nothing before it. There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you..
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Rachel Kushner |
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6f801e9
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Haberlerin ozelligi bunlarin hicbir zaman sizin basiniza gelmemesidir.
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Rachel Kushner |
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9fb22e5
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Ski racing was drawing in time, I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was drawing in order to win.
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Rachel Kushner |
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e5de91b
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Arkhisan ta pegadakia. E Gkloria serbire to epidorpio. O Ntintie akoumpese to tsigaro tou sten akre tou piatou me ta amugdalota, skorpizontas stakhtes kai trimmata apo amugdalota kai epimenontas oti o Phroint eikhe dikio otan diateinotan oti e glossa einai o monadikos dromos pros to asuneideto. O Stanlei anteteine oti e glossa dotheke ston anthropo gia na krubei tis skepseis tou kai oti to mono pou mporouses na kaneis me tis lexeis etan na ..
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words
freudian
subconscious
language
thinking
language-barrier
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Rachel Kushner |
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3dc3335
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Na goeteuesai semainei na theleis kati kai sunama na xereis, kapou mesa sou, okhi se kapoio emphanes semeio, oti den prokeitai na to apokteseis.
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Rachel Kushner |
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ad62b73
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When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I'd seen on the Via del Corso. Jeans for the people. Cheese and bread and wine for the people. Umbrellas for the people, because rain fell and fell that week.
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Rachel Kushner |
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a5a2f56
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Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.
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people
taste
shooting
safety
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Rachel Kushner |
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00fc6fb
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What had actually been in Valera's haversack: not a woman's vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.
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Rachel Kushner |
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634b294
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That's just one group. The most visible one. There are so many groups at this point. Many of them come together only after an action, to give those who committed the action a name, and then they disband, disappear. You can't know who is part of what. They don't know, either. They might not know they are in a group until the action is done and the group claims it.
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Rachel Kushner |
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51a9246
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I don't know if it's revolutionary not to work," she had told me, "but it's better. When you sell your body you are what you do. You're yourself and you get paid for it," or so she had thought at the time,"
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Rachel Kushner |
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92c2b4d
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La Maziere had met with El Extrano at a chicken-dinner-and-cockfight joint near the Havana airport, a place that proved even more vulgar than the concept had sounded.
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Rachel Kushner |
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04b3dde
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Because I didn't move here to fall in love. The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it's worthy of respect. it's not admirable to want love it just is.
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love
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Rachel Kushner |
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42c73b6
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But since you bring it up, Didier, you know what I think of language? That it's a fake horizon and there's something else, a real truthful thing, but language is keeping us from it. And I think we should torture language to stop fucking around and tell it to us. We should torture language to tell the truth.
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Rachel Kushner |
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5f3cf57
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He occasionally missed Simone, but every time, right after feeling a desire to see her again, he was always relieved not to have to deal with her. If she could just appear at certain exact moments - when he was horny, or needed someone to talk to - that would have worked out fine, but people were not like that. There were hours built in where you had to hear someone express feelings about something that didn't seem important, and you nodded..
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Rachel Kushner |
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bf3fded
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Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos.
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Rachel Kushner |
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308bae7
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And there you were," he said. "In your cotton-underweared splendor."
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Rachel Kushner |
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e9eb0b3
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By caring just that much less than whatever you ante as indifference.
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Rachel Kushner |
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9c1ec80
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There were hours built in where you had to hear someone express feelings about something that didn't seem important, and you nodded and pretended that it was. You had to mask your own ambivalence and pretend to be in love one hundred percent of the time, and he'd rather swim in a lake of hellfire.
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Rachel Kushner |
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a67acf1
|
At a health food store he and I had run into a girl I knew who was spaced out and scratching herself. She asked Jimmy if he knew whether the juice she'd chosen was organic, and he acted like he'd never encountered that kind of contradiction, junkies who refuse non-organic juice. He was a little sheltered, like most people who come to the city from elsewhere. Normal, educated, had a job, felt there was a purpose to his existence and so forth..
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Rachel Kushner |
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2f661b1
|
What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place. P.49
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Rachel Kushner |
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1961029
|
was one of those. If you follow their rules, they make more rules. You have to fight people or you end up with nothing.
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Rachel Kushner |