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b110eb9
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And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.
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Donna Tartt |
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9500f91
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The lamplight was eerie, and, standing there motionless in our bathrobes, sleepy, with shadows flickering all around, I felt as though I had woken from one dream into an even more remote one, some bizarre wartime bomb shelter of the unconscious.
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dreams
dream-within-a-dream
donna-tartt
the-secret-history
descriptive
eerie
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Donna Tartt |
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83bd5f2
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Hobie]"Theo." His hug was strong and parental, and so fierce that it made me cry even harder. Then his hand was on my shoulder, heavy anchoring hand that was security and authority itself; he was leading me in, into the workshop, dim gilt and rich wood smells I'd dreamed of, up the stairs into the long-lost parlor, with its velvets and urns and bronzes."
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Donna Tartt |
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214c1fe
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Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.
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the-secret-history
literature-quotes
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Donna Tartt |
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178aea2
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It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?
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Donna Tartt |
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046c335
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I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality--talk, footsteps, slamming doors--which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.
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donna-tartt
the-secret-history
figurative-language
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Donna Tartt |
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5d28e2f
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It's awful being a child," she said, simply, "at the mercy of other people."
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Donna Tartt |
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9d2326b
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A picture that will never leave me. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
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Donna Tartt |
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d2d8ba9
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I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame.
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Donna Tartt |
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7783a88
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Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time:
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Donna Tartt |
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571c74a
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It made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I'd been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any movement blow me part.
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Donna Tartt |
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0012dac
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That life--whatever else it is--is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.
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Donna Tartt |
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20688ed
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I never took it out...though even when I couldn't see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.
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Donna Tartt |
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0a2781d
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Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.
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Donna Tartt |
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78c69be
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I see that as usual I've gone on too long and that I'm running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it's all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there's anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will.
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Donna Tartt |
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1edd6c0
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A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are. Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform me..
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Donna Tartt |
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b9af850
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People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselve..
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Donna Tartt |
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718e15c
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I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty's death, Andy's death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door,
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Donna Tartt |
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24034cd
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The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star
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Donna Tartt |
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74b9d52
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And-maybe it's ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn't matter since no one's ever going to see this--but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end--and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?
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Donna Tartt |
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b6643dd
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From my chair I had a clear view of Hobie's Noah's Ark: paired elephants, zebras, carven beasts marching two by two, clear down to tiny hen and rooster and the bunnies and mice bringing up the rear. And the memory was located there, beyond words, a coded message from that first afternoon: rain streaming down the skylights, the homely file of creatures lined on the kitchen counter waiting to be saved. Noah: the great conservator, the great c..
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Donna Tartt |
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a0a0ed8
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Lo so, lo so, ma ascoltami. Hai letto L'idiota, vero? Si. Beh, L'idiota e un libro molto inquietante per me. Mi ha fatto cosi effetto che dopo non ho quasi piu letto romanzi, a parte roba tipo 'Uomini che odiano le donne'. Perche... provavo a intromettermi, ...be', magari me lo dici dopo, a cosa pensavi, lasciami finire di dirti perche l'ho trovato inquietante. Perche tutto quello che Myskin fa e buono... altruista... tratta tutti con compa..
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il-cardellino
the-goldfinch
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Donna Tartt |
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6aebd1d
|
I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life.
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donna-tartt
the-secret-history
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Donna Tartt |
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b494556
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The word itself had lost little of its power to startle and had, due to my ignorance of the physical place it occupied on the globe, assumed a peculiar life of its own. There was the harsh Ar at the beginning, which called up gold, idols, lost cities in the jungle, which in turn led to the hushed and sinister chamber of Gen, with the bright, interrogative Tina at the end--all nonsense, of course, but then it seemed in some muddled way that ..
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the-secret-place
donna-tartt
whimsical
wordplay
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Donna Tartt |
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38dfe1d
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In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight?
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humor
life
donna-tartt
the-secret-history
ocd
horror
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Donna Tartt |
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1377dd0
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I was in the Midwest, and the rain was all I had left of Camilla's goodbye kiss. Raindrops on the windshield, radio stations fading in and out. Cornfields bleak in all those gray, wide-open reaches. I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her for..
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Donna Tartt |
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19209bb
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There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty--unless she is wed to something more meaningful--is always superficial.
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Donna Tartt |
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24d5089
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And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And--I would argu..
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Donna Tartt |
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4af5d38
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A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.
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Donna Tartt |
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c18f14b
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The man shrank. It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big. Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book (why does no one ever see that 'bookish' Clark Kent, without his glasses, is Superman?). Or maybe it was a question of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible: in a roo..
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Donna Tartt |
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09229c7
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It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.
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reality
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Donna Tartt |
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f9a7161
|
It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late at night, asking passersby for the timetable of the Midnight Express that derailed twenty years before, I wandered from light to light until that dreaded hour when all the doors closed and, step..
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Donna Tartt |
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09c13eb
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I see so little of you these days, Richard," he said. "I feel that you're becoming just a shadow in my life."
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Donna Tartt |
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dd4df72
|
There was a strong sense of being alone, in wintry deadness. Nothing made sense in any direction.
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Donna Tartt |
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32be459
|
Not long before, I had stayed up late with my mother and watched Citizen Kane, and I was very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and remember her for the rest of his life. Someday I too might be like the old man in the movie, leaning back in my chair with a far-off look in my eyes, and saying: "You know, that was sixty years ago, and I never saw that girl with the red hair again, but you know ..
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Donna Tartt |
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e596cba
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hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition--whatever
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Donna Tartt |
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3381208
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We have art in order not to die from the truth. -- NIETZSCHE
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Donna Tartt |
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a356a8a
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My grandest boyhood ambition was to be a professor of history at Notre Dame. Although what I do now is just a different way of working with history, I suppose.") He told me about his blind-in-one-eye canary rescued from a Woolworth's who woke him singing every morning of his boyhood; the bout of rheumatic fever that kept him in bed for six months; and the queer little antique neighborhood library with frescoed ceilings ("torn down now, alas..
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Donna Tartt |
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a2e79b6
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When she went back to the telephone Hely's breath, on the other end, was ragged and secretive.
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Donna Tartt |
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05df911
|
Joan Miro: You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life
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Donna Tartt |
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0367c6a
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We belonged together; there was a dream rightness and magic to it, inarguable; the thought of her flooded every corner of my mind with light and poured brightness into miraculous lofts I hadn't even known were there, vistas that seemed to exist not at all except in relationship to her.
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Donna Tartt |
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bd14b3b
|
By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world. Though he enjoyed going ou..
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Donna Tartt |
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9a99ff3
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But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
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Donna Tartt |
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7a2f174
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It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they'd purchased through their decorators for the price of a good Queen Anne--but (I was responsible for telling them, reluctantly) had not held its value and could not ..
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furniture
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Donna Tartt |