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aaccc2d
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He stopped going to his own bed, waiting instead until Leander was ready for bed and then going to the room with him, the dog once more in his wake. He began to look forward to the night, to what happened between them in these hours, and to the morning when they woke.
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796922a
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It would make her less nervous in one way, she thought, but maybe more so in another, because she knew that people would look at her and might have a view on her that was wrong if she were dressed up like this every day
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Colm Tóibín |
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2dc7309
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Henry wondered, too, what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a world which would inevitably attempt to confine her. His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her.
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cade059
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Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.
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a7d17d3
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Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her. She
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f5796ef
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It was like the arrival of night when you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again.
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Colm Tóibín |
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be8b6a2
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Izslushvaneto iziskva poveche usiliia ot govoreneto.
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Colm Tóibín |
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5a0a351
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He arranged the ceremony for two o'clock in the afternoon a week before she was to leave. The exam had gone well and she was almost certain that she would qualify. Because other couples to be married came with family and friends, their ceremony seemed brisk and over quickly and caused much curiosity among those waiting because they had come alone. On their journey to Coney Island on the train that afternoon Tony raised the question for the ..
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wedding-ring
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Colm Tóibín |
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64458a3
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From now on the architects would take over as the high preists of this bourgeois city.
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Colm Tóibín |
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96d41dd
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she would never have an ordinary day again in this ordinary place, that the rest of her life would be a struggle with the unfamiliar.
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Colm Tóibín |
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aeafe45
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Even when she woke in the night and thought about it, she did not allow herself to conclude that she did not want to go.
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Colm Tóibín |
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1c9b686
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she still stopped when her mind moved towards real fear or dread or, worse, towards the thought that she was going to lose this world for ever, that she would never have an ordinary day again in this ordinary place, that the rest of her life would be a struggle with the unfamiliar.
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Colm Tóibín |
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623d179
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As they looked at one another, Nora felt Fiona was hostile, and forced herself to remember how upset she must be, and how lonely she might be too. She smiled as she said that they would have to go and in return Fiona smiled at her and at the boys. As soon as Nora walked away, however, she felt helpless and regretted not having said something kind or special or consoling to Fiona before they left her; maybe even something as simple as asking..
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Colm Tóibín |
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2dbca66
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S Nuriia chakakha s nai-goliamo net'rpenie onezi niakolko sedmitsi prez avgust, kogato roditelite im zanimavakha s priiateli na p'teshestvie s iakhta, a momichetata ostavakha sami s baba si i gostite, koito idvakha i si otivakha. K'shchata t'neshe v sianka i prokhlada, izl'chvashe asketichnost. Pod balkona otzad be slozhena d'lga masa, koiato se redeshe prilezhno tri p'ti dnevno. Gradinata be op'rlena ot sl'ntseto i morskiia briz. Blizkiiat..
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Colm Tóibín |
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1fb6d86
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she had made a decision for herself, the idea that she had asked no one's advice. It was the first time since she had sold the house in Cush that such a chance had come so easily, and she was glad she had taken it. Perhaps it was not wise; perhaps it made more sense to be grateful to the Gibneys. But it pleased her now to be grateful to no one.
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Colm Tóibín |
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e6b11f0
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May Lacey, wisps of thin grey hair appearing from under her hat, her scarf still around her neck, sat opposite Nora in the back room and began to talk. After a while, the boys went upstairs; Conor, when Nora called him, was too shy to come down and say good night, but soon Donal came and sat in the room with them, carefully studying May Lacey, saying nothing.
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Colm Tóibín |
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d4d1de6
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this was a piece of gross presumption on Mrs. Kehoe's part but also that the decision to give her, the most recently arrived, the best room in the house not only would cause bitterness and difficulty between herself and Patty, Diana, Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan but would come to mean, in time, that Mrs. Kehoe herself would feel free to call in the favour she had done her. She
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Colm Tóibín |
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60c8946
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And then it occurred to her that she was already feeling that she would need to remember this room, her sister, this scene, as though from a distance. In the silence that had lingered, she realized, it had somehow been tacitly arranged that Eilis would go to America. Father Flood, she believed, had been invited to the house because Rose knew that he could arrange it. Her
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Colm Tóibín |
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9049bcd
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Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions.
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Colm Tóibín |
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4882aeb
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Greta Wickham. He used to say if only Nora and Greta were here now, we wouldn't be in this mess, even when there was no mess at all." "Oh, he talked very warmly about you," Peggy interjected, "and William Junior and Thomas had nothing but good words to say about Maurice Webster when he was teaching them. I remember one day Thomas had a temperature and we all wanted him to stay in bed and he wouldn't, oh no he wouldn't, because he had a doub..
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e137b01
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more she thought about it the more she came
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dc168f8
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woman who had not told him or anybody
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Colm Tóibín |
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286fab7
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That was not even ten years ago, it might have been six or seven years ago, and if anyone had told her that she would be standing here now listening to this song and all the things that had happened between then and now, she would not have believed them.
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3b45243
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though
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Colm Tóibín |
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f52601e
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In future, she hoped, fewer people would call. In future, once the boys went to bed, she might have the house to herself more often. She would learn how to spend these hours. In the peace of these winter evenings, she would work out how she was going to live.
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Colm Tóibín |
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833e554
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It occurred to her that he had thought more closely about her over the previous few years than she had about him. She wondered if that could be true. She knew that how she felt affected him, and now, for the first time, how he felt seemed more urgent, more worthy of attention than any of her feelings. All she could do was to let him know and make him believe that she would do everything she promised to do.
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Colm Tóibín |
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254bd51
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That which interest me above all else,' he wrote,'is the caligraphy of a tree or the tiles of a roof, and I mean leaf by leaf, branch by branch, blade by blade of the grass.
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Colm Tóibín |
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5560beb
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And, in return, when I get sick, you can come out and look after me when the others get fed up of me. That's what we are all for.
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Colm Tóibín |
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9e119ef
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all my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty, but it is foolishness that I have noticed first.
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Colm Tóibín |
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9ec5138
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people shouting that if he could heal the sick and make the crippled walk and the blind see, then he could raise the dead.
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Colm Tóibín |
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b40c1a4
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She loved them, each of them, and found the differences between the four brothers intriguing, but sometimes she found the pleasure of being alone after a lunch or a supper with them greater than the pleasure of the meal itself.
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Colm Tóibín |
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310d5b5
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But that will be the beginning." "Of what?" I asked. "Of a new life for the world,"
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Colm Tóibín |
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49ddb45
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She tried to think of Tony now as a loving and comforting presence, but she saw instead someone she was allied with whether she liked it or not, someone who was, she thought, unlikely to allow her to forget the nature of the alliance and his need for her to return.
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Colm Tóibín |
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44212cd
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For each day, she thought, she needed a whole other day to contemplate what had happened and store it away, get it out of her system so that it did not keep her awake at night or fill her dreams with flashes of what had actually happened and other flashes that had nothing to do with anything familiar, but were full of rushes of colour or crowds of people, everything frenzied and fast.
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Colm Tóibín |
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f83cb5b
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And she saw all three of them--Tony, Jim, her mother--as figures whom she could only damage, as innocent people surrounded by light and clarity, and circling around them was herself, dark, uncertain.
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Colm Tóibín |
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89d1b01
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He was the boy I had given birth to and he was more defenceless now than he had been then.
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Colm Tóibín |
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503732e
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Trollope and Balzac, Zola and Dickens would, he felt, have become bitter old preachers, or mad hairy schoolmasters had they been born in New England and condemned to live amongst its people.
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Colm Tóibín |
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0396870
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his legs where the bones had been broken,
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Colm Tóibín |
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bd7c651
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By day the old area of Barcelona is bustling, full of shouting, hammering, drilling and shutters being pulled up and down. You listen out for sounds. If you want a replacement gas cylinder you wait for the sound of the delivery man hitting a cylinder with a piece of metal in the street.
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Colm Tóibín |
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574225d
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I have been acquainted with the smell of death. The sickly, sugary smell that wafted in the wind towards the rooms in this palace. It is easy now for me to feel peaceful and content.
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Colm Tóibín |
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ecd29d5
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Her two visitors are clearly some of the apostles, the men who wrote the New Testament; others, such as Miriam or her "cousin" Marcus, are invented."
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Colm Tóibín |
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41d11dd
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It had been easier to present a self in full possession of pride and confidence.
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Colm Tóibín |
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9228f18
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I don't go in for change. It is not one of my subjects. I have always taken the view that noticing change is a mistake. I notice what is directly in front of me.
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Colm Tóibín |
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4543e2b
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There was a time, I know, when I felt rage and I felt sorrow. But now I have lost what leads up to rage and sorrow. Maybe the only reason I wander in these spaces has to do with some other feeling, or what is left of it. Maybe that feeling is love. There is someone whom I love still, or have loved and protected, but I cannot be sure of that. No name will come. Some words come, but not the words I want, which are the names. If I can say the ..
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Colm Tóibín |