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31eb43e
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People had hoped to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. They thought it would be a shared crisis. They would feel a sense of shared purpose, shared destiny. Like a snowstorm that blankets a large city - but lasting months, lasting years, carrying everyone along, creating fellow feeling where there was only suspicion and fear. The war would ennoble everything we say and do. What was impersonal would become personal. What was so..
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Don DeLillo |
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43a94bd
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and the man and the chair went different ways.
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Don DeLillo |
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9a52f29
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I've heard about a man and woman who are walking the length of the Great Wall of China, approaching each other from opposite directions. Every time I think of them, I see them from above., with the Wall twisting and winding through the landscape and two tiny human figures moving toward each other from remote provinces, step by step. I think this is a story of reverence for the planet, of trying to understand how we belong to the planet in a..
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Don DeLillo |
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537ccb9
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There is a seaward bulge of stratocumulus. Sun glint and littoral drift. I see blooms of plankton in a blue of such Persian richness it seems an animal rapture, a colour change to express some form of intuitive delight.
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Don DeLillo |
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e5d0ebc
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Don't you sometimes feel a power in you? An extreme state of good health. An arrogant healthiness. That's it. You are feeling so good you begin thinking you're a little superior to most people. An optimism about yourself that you generate at the expense of others. Don't you sometimes feel this?
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Don DeLillo |
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2b3b2bb
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We listen to the old radio shows. Light flares and spreads across the blue-banded edge, sunrise, sunset, the urban grids in shadow. There is a sweetness in the tenor voice of the young man singing, a simple vigour that time and distance and random noise have enveloped in eloquence and yearning. Every sound, every lilt of strings has this veneer of age.
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Don DeLillo |
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007d131
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Aun puedo verles en esa pantalla primitiva que nuestro cerebro produce, a unos ocho centimetros delante de mis ojos, miniaturizados por el tiempo y la distancia, desdibujados por las interferencias visuales, cada figura como una cinta roja que danzara en el aire. Todos ellos se cuentan entre aquellas personas a las que he intentado conocer dos veces, la segunda de ellas en el recuerdo y el lenguaje. A traves de ellas, yo mismo. Son aquellos..
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Don DeLillo |
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a22bbe2
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often. They seemed to shine together at the center of things. They made things theirs. A certain bench in the park, near the chess players, ordinary things, not unusual in any way.
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Don DeLillo |
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014156c
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La preghiera e una strategia pratica, la conquista di un vantaggio temporale nei mercati capitali del Peccato e della Remissione.
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preghiera
religione
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Don DeLillo |
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83717ab
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The mountains here contained a sense of time, geologic time. They lay in embryo, a process unfolding, or a shriveled dying perhaps. They had the look of naked events.
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Don DeLillo |
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135022b
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The kids are a guarantee of our relative longevity. We're safe as long as they're around. But once they get big and scatter, she wants to be the first to go. She is afraid I will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in the night. It isn't that she doesn't cherish life; it's being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness. Mastercard, Visa, American Express. I tell her I want to die first. I've gotten so..
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Don DeLillo |
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d18de69
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I'm at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space.
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Don DeLillo |
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de7bc44
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Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children
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Don DeLillo |
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5d86c1f
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This is what comes from the wrong kind of attentiveness. People get brain fade. This is because they've forgotten how to listen and look as children. They've forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second spot for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people's eyes..
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disaster
fade
sign
signal
television
transmission
tv
waves
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Don DeLillo |
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d61d739
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We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other's views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals.
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Don DeLillo |
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33b3338
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A band played live Muzak.
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Don DeLillo |
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0436d72
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We're not gonna die We're not gonna die We're not gonna die, leading them in a chant, a mantra that was joyful and mock joyful at the same time because this is New York, New York and we want it both ways.
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Don DeLillo |
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0a69363
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In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins.
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Don DeLillo |
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3a712e2
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Traffic was stopped dead and I nudged the window switch and listened to the blowing horns approach peak volume. We were trapped in our own obsessive clamor.
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Don DeLillo |
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c486010
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She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.
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Don DeLillo |
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3a9a0ed
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The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages.
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Don DeLillo |
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5ba1ee3
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The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It's a moment never to be thought of except when it's in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn't seem peculiar. It is only me. I don't think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind.
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Don DeLillo |
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65fc397
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The world was a series of fleeting gratifications.
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Don DeLillo |
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9907c73
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There's a certain man, an archetype, he's a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you're going to marry.
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Don DeLillo |
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92dcfde
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If your child thinks you're guilty of something, right or wrong, then you're guilty.
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Don DeLillo |
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0811ef3
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I'll tell you what surprises me." "Is it my eyes? Is it my lips?" "It's your cat," he said. "I don't have a cat." "That's what surprises me." "You think I'm a cat person." "I see you with a cat, definitely. There ought to be a cat slipping along the walls."
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Don DeLillo |
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78d46a4
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People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person's life, all those who entered and left, there's a depth, a richness.
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Don DeLillo |
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eb5621f
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I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever. My
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Don DeLillo |
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3ca1a12
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I'd been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty, define truth. I had to stop before it killed me. The
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Don DeLillo |
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5e80951
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I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense. *
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Don DeLillo |
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8aff33b
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Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history
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Don DeLillo |
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48965e9
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Too much engenders too much.
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Don DeLillo |
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d7c4e54
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For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.
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Don DeLillo |
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3a0884d
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This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished
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Don DeLillo |
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d2adb9d
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When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.
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Don DeLillo |
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0cceee9
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Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?
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Don DeLillo |
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85bd945
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Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows.
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satire
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Don DeLillo |
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26fb1e0
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When the going gets tough the tough get going
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Don DeLillo |
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8eb72fb
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The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.
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Don DeLillo |
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779064e
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The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies.
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Don DeLillo |
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c3b700b
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The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt or attraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theater, sports, conversation and sex. This is a town of dry cleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. These pictures have not changed in years. The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other sta..
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Don DeLillo |
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49c8275
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Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Cal..
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Don DeLillo |
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8b84529
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Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.
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Don DeLillo |
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acee617
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Then she took of her panties and handed them to me. I tossed them on the bed and got undressed. I felt a breath of estrangement in the room and thought she might be a voyeur of her own experience, living at an angle to the moment and recording in some state of future-mind. But then she pulled me down, snatched a fistful of hair and pulled me into a kiss, and there was a heat in her, a hungry pulse that resembled a gust of being.
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Don DeLillo |