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e743ccf
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Marriage can, should, and must evolve. Don't be alarmed, and don't resent it. Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. In the long run, it's the unasked-for hot-water bottles on winter nights that matter more than the extravagant gestures. Express gratitude, especially for work that tends to get taken for granted. Identify problems as they arise, remembering that anger is flammable. When we've behaved like a donkey, remember that a sincere apolog..
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David Mitchell |
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98972ab
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In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.
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lords-and-ladies
neuve-chapelle
slade-house
grief-and-loss
horror
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David Mitchell |
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3776669
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The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's me..
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David Mitchell |
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5189fa8
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The rectum of Wybo Gerritszoon releases a hot fart of horror.
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David Mitchell |
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f92e71f
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I loved Vinny like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He'd spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in.
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David Mitchell |
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23423e5
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with zero fillings, revealed by the so-so joke--"Have you heard the news about Schrodinger's Cat? It died today; wait--it didn't, did, didn't, did ..."; high-volume discourse on who's the best Bond; on Gilmour and Waters and Syd; on hyperreality; dollar-pound parity; Sartre, Bart Simpson, Barthes's myths; "Make mine a double"; George Michael's stubble; "Like, music expired with the Smiths"; urbane and entitled, for the most part, my peers; ..
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David Mitchell |
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b767d72
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Despair is as attractive as cold sores.
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David Mitchell |
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6a684e5
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All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.
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David Mitchell |
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14464c5
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When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.
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David Mitchell |
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d636200
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He sees, and smells, that the mishap was caused by a large human turd.
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David Mitchell |
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b777d7a
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Our truth is terrorsome cold.
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David Mitchell |
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09af89e
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only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"
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David Mitchell |
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f05202d
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And don't knock nepotism, Cheeseman; my well-connected uncles all agree, nepotism made this country what it is today.
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David Mitchell |
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a5c2860
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The best way to work with dementia is to act as if the person you knew is still inside the wreckage. If you're wrong, and the person you know is gone, then no damage is done but the standards of care stay high; if you're right, and the person you knew is still bricked up inside, then you are the lifeline.
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David Mitchell |
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d9adf60
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No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed.
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David Mitchell |
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f15a9d0
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How improbable must a coincidence be before it's a sign?
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David Mitchell |
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592182f
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The parlor was inhabited by a monstrous hog's head (afflicted with droop-jaw & lazy-eye), killed by the twins on their sixteenth birthday, & a somnambulant Grandfather clock (at odds with my own pocket watch by a margin of hours. Indeed, one valued import from New Zealand is the accurate time).
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David Mitchell |
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7f42533
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My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful."
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David Mitchell |
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932b7da
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Es como vomitar un huevo a la escocesa podrido: siempre crees que has terminado y siempre hay mas.
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spanish
translate
david-mitchell
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David Mitchell |
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7f9b613
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An unkind describer might refer to her face as like a party nobody's turned up to.
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David Mitchell |
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30a0e6f
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Guys are all sperm-guns.
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sperm-guns
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David Mitchell |
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5c317ee
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A twig snaps. I am intensely alive.
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David Mitchell |
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86a26da
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Six feet directly beneath his seat is a suitcase in the baggage hold containing enough C-4 to turn an airplane into a meteor.
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David Mitchell |
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5b378c0
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What women want is still what it's always been: either you or, more likely, not you.
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women
preferences
truth-of-life
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David Mitchell |
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bb89d88
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I lied, yes, but that doesn't make me a liar. Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, small wrong may be a big right.
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David Mitchell |
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16db9a9
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Alguem que pense que <> e com certeza porque o tem em grande quantidade.
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David Mitchell |
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cf4c858
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My curiosity is dying, I told Professor Mephi one pleasant day, during a seminar on Thomas Paine. I remember the sounds of a baseball game drifting thru his open window. My mentor said we had to identify the source of this malady, and urgently. I said something about reading not being knowledge, about knowledge without xperience being food without sustenance. "You need to get out more," remarked the professor."
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David Mitchell |
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25397ef
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bagpipes and electric guitars usually end in tears
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David Mitchell |
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0556db0
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Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, and though a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud and so is a soul.
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David Mitchell |
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ae2849f
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I do not break my Sabbath fast in a whorehouse.
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David Mitchell |
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a8add42
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You were five or six, Raf. When you washed up on the rocks below you were in shock, you had hypothermia, you'd seen slaughter at close quarters, you'd drifted for heaven only knows how long in the cold Atlantic, you were alone. You're not a forgetter, you're a survivor. I think it's a miracle you remember anything at all." Rafiq takes a clipping of his own hair, fallen onto his thigh, and rubs it moodily between his finger and thumb. I thin..
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David Mitchell |
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5fc1156
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But it's the feeling of love that we love, not the person. It's that giddy exhilaration I just experienced, just now. The feeling of being chosen and desired and cared about. It's pretty pathetic when you examine it clearheadedly.
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David Mitchell |
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6c08273
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What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?
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self-deprecating
literary-criticism
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David Mitchell |
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c17a02d
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February's so gloomy in this part of the world", said Mrs. de Roo, "don't you think? It's not so much a month as a twenty-eight day long Monday morning"
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David Mitchell |
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c69c774
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I consider how you don't get to choose whom you're attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I've always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class difference is sexuality's Berlin Wall. Certainly, I can't read Holly Sykes as well as I can girls from my own incometax tribe, but you never know. God made the whole Earth in six days, and I'm in Switzerland for nine or ten.
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David Mitchell |
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60dc8d5
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Or, if he's feeling more poetic, it might be "Now, Frobisher, the clarinet is the concubine, the violas are yew trees in the cemetery, the clavichord is the moon, so ... let the east wind blow that A minor chord, sixteenth bar onwards."
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David Mitchell |
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59ebf9f
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Sorry, poppet," I tell Aoife. "I was miles away." "No, you weren't. You're right here." "I was miles away metaphorically." "What's meta ... frickilly?" "The opposite of literally." "What's litter-lily?" "The opposite of metaphorically." Aoife pouts. "Be serious, Daddy."
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David Mitchell |
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a5eafc7
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Las autobiografias ya de por si son infumables, !pero anda que las novelitas! Heroe emprende viaje, forastero llega a la ciudad, alguien persigue algo, lo consigue o no lo consigue, conflicto entre voluntades opuestas. "Admiradme, porque soy una metafora"." --
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literature
spanish
novela
literatura
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David Mitchell |
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fb1e5f3
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an' that cold hand o' wind was Old Georgie's hand, yay, the devil what was standin' there wavin' a crookit spoon.
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David Mitchell |
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98ae8e1
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Chert voz'mi, kogda tvoi roditeli umiraiut, oni pereseliaiutsia v tebia.
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David Mitchell |
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ff0c643
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Stranno - razmishliava Milt'n. - Vlast, vreme, gravitatsiia, liubov, Oniia sili, koito naistina ne mozhesh prebori, sa vse nevidimi.
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David Mitchell |
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f152312
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Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat.
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David Mitchell |
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6cb1ec6
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Nie - pod tova razbiram vsichki nad shestdeset -s's samoto si s'shchestvuvane izv'rshvame dve pregresheniia. Ednoto e lipsata na b'rzina. Karame tv'rde bavno, khodim tv'rde bavno, govorim tv'rde bavno. Svet't e gotov da v'rti sdelki s diktatori, perverznitsi i narkobaroni ot vsiakakva velichina, no ne ponasia da go baviat. Vtoroto ni pregreshenie e, che v ochite na vseki chovek nie sme memento mori. Svet't mozhe da otricha s blesnali ochi n..
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David Mitchell |
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4dc1629
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Miroliubie, khot' i vozliubleno nashim Gospodom, iavliaet soboi glavnuiu dobrodetel' tol'ko v tom sluchae, esli vashi sosedi razdeliaiut vashi ubezhdeniia.
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David Mitchell |