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79b1542
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IS IT SO TERRIBLE NOT TO KEEP THE MATTER IN MY HEART, TO GET THE MATTER OUT OF MY HEART, TO EMPTY MY HEART OF THIS MATTER? WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MY HEART?
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E.L. Doctorow |
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a5bbef0
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He wondered seriously if love wasn't a feeling at all but a simple characterless state of shared isolation. If you were alone with a woman your feelings might change from moment to moment but the circumstance of your shared fate did not change. Maybe that's where the love was, in the combined circumstance.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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94ce3fa
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one day you stepped in snow, the next in mud, water soaked in your boots and froze them at night, it was the next worst thing to pure blizzardry, it was weather that wouldn't let you settle.
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frontier-and-pioneer-life
western
snow
weather
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E.L. Doctorow |
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278834d
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Daniel: What do you think of the idea? Sternlight: I'll tell you man, I think it's a fantastic idea. Fuck me if I'm consistent. I told your sister if she had all that bread to pass on for a bail fund or a free school or any good shit like that, I would retract everything I said about your parents. Not only that, I would actually change my opinion. I would think differently. OK? Daniel: OK. Sternlight: discards the poster. Sternlight: That's..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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94b069f
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So that individuation may be compared to a pyramid in that it is only achieved by the placement of the top stone... The Jews, Ford said. They ain't like anyone else I know. There goes you theory up shits creek. He smiled.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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d7a2fec
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We may prefer a more primitive analysis: that when you defeat an enemy you are required to eat his heart. In this way is your victory recorded with The Gods. In this way too do The Gods ensure the continuation of their amusement: you consume the heart of your enemy so that it can no longer be said of him that he exists -- except as he exists in you.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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9186db5
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One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died. Of what? We'll get to that. I can't do this alone, Andrew said, as Martha stared at him from the open doorway. It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew's NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by t..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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cb40f8f
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Happiness consists of living in the dailiness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you're happy.
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happiness-life
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E.L. Doctorow |
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5158316
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It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.
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wealth
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E.L. Doctorow |
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b93cad0
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Emily supposed the modern world was fortunate in the progress of science. But she could not help but feel at this moment the impropriety of male invasiveness. She knew he was working to save this poor woman, but in her mind, too, was a sense of Wrede's science as adding to the abuse committed by his fellow soldiers. He said not a word. It was as if the girl were no more than the surgical challenge she offered.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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75b7008
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For a moment he thought the chair was aligned, but then he decided it was not. He moved it another turn to the right. He tried sitting in the chair now but it still felt peculiar. He turned it again. Eventually he made a complete circle and still he could not find the proper alignment for the chair.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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d6606c3
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Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes... I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now... that if it were possible to life this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth... and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables--all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath--how seedlings would sprout and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills...
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E.L. Doctorow |
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1841011
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It has taken time and the blundering wisdom and anarchic greed of our ancestry to construct the modern city of consolidated institutions. It is a great historically amassed communal creation. If you fly above it at night, it is a jeweled wonder of the universe, floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness. It is smart, accomplished, sophisticated, and breathtakingly beautiful. And it glimmers and sparkles as all things breakable glimm..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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0c282de
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Of course movies today no longer require film. They are recorded and held in digital suspension as ones and zeroes. And so at the moment the last remaining piece of the world is lit and shot for a movie, there will be another Big Bang... and the multitudes of ones and zeroes will be strewn through the universe as particles that act like waves... until, shaken by borealic winds or ignited by solar flares or otherwise galvanized by this or th..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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62458c5
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In those days, this was years for the sputnik thing, it was customary to downgrade the Russians' science. People who know something about those things didn't make that mistake. But at the level of Time magazine the joke was how they copied everything and claimed it for their own. Well, of course the corollary of that is that it's our bomb they have and that means we were betrayed. After the war our whole foreign policy depended on our havin..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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1d41670
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I cite too the ordinary fears of mortality the inspection of a fast-growing mole on the side of the nose blood in the stool a painful injury or the mournful witness of the slow death of a parent all this is given to all men as well as the starting awake in the nether hours of the night from such glutinous nightmare that on'e self name relationships nationality place in life all data of specificity wipe out amnesiatically asiatically you don..
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life
stream-of-consciousness
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E.L. Doctorow |
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9aa1118
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Treason the only crime defined in the Constitution. Tyranny as under the Stuart and Tudor kings characterized by the elimination of political dissent under the laws of treason. Treason statutes which were many and unending, the instrument by which the monarch eliminated his opposition and also added to his wealth. The property of the executed traitor forfeited by his heirs because of the loathsomeness of his crime. The prosecution of treaso..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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cac314d
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He was a moody, distracted young fellow, and it was clear his own mind was more company to him than people were.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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b899174
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I knew he was the real thing because when he laughed other men at the table laughed with him.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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97bf6a2
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One of Winston's colleagues in the Ministry of Truth who is working on the dictionary explains the beauty of Newspeak: You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words--scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.... It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.... Take good, for instance. If you have a word like good, what need is ..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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1245019
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Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theatre. On illusion. Banks, the illusion of stability and honourable dealings to the rot and corruption of capitalist exploitation. Churches the illusion of sacred sanctuary of purposes of pacifying social discontent. Courtrooms of course designed to promote the illusion of solemn justice. If there was true justice why would such trappings be necessary? Wouldn't a table a..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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e2d9157
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That a president is inevitably put forward and elected by the forces of established wealth and power means usually that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn appreciation of the vote..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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d7ca375
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Under the charge against us the normal rules of evidence are suspended. For us they don't exist.WE are charged not with committing espionage, but with conspiring to commit espionage. Since espionage itself does not have to be proved, no evidence is required that we have done anything. All that is required is evidence that we intended to do something. And what is this evidence? Coincidentally enough under the law the testimony of our so-call..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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9b84246
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Happiness consists of living in the dailyness of life and not knowing how happy you are. True happiness comes of not knowing you're happy, it's an animal serenity, something between contentment and joy, a steadiness of the belonged self in the world.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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621c423
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It's a kind of jail, the brain's mind. We've got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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44f3393
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The experience of experience is untransmittable.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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dcde97f
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Consciousness without world is impossible, just as there is no sight without the light to see by. Is that your objection,
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E.L. Doctorow |
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7d246c3
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the forms of life were volatile and that everything in the world could as easily be something else.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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c082629
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I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative...A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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a2f46e4
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And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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1e437a6
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And to top everything he's got this problem he can't let her know how he feels: What-he's shy? Shy! Tell me who in this goddamn world is shy? Young, old, the lame and halt. Clobber you over the head with what they feel. Oh Man I wish just once in my long fucked-up life someone had come up to me who was too shy to tell me what they thought of me...
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E.L. Doctorow |
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3f5099d
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It was as if God had decreed this characterless engagement of brainless forces as his answer to the human presumption.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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d595918
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Leo Crowley, Harry [Truman]'s Foreign Economic Administrator, tells Congressmen the theory...: 'If you create good governments in foreign countries, automatically you will have better markets for ourselves.' With that honeycunt staring you in the face, you'd forget your grammar too.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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9ae660b
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A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world!
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E.L. Doctorow |
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bbafa75
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We have to be wary of our brains. They make our decisions before we make them. They lead us to still waters. They renounceth free will. And it gets weirder: If you slice a brain down the middle, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere will operate self-sufficiently and not know what the other is doing.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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407769f
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Daniel: What do you think of the idea? Sternlight: I'll tell you man, I think it's a fantastic idea. Fuck me if I'm consistent. I told your sister if she had all that bread to pass on for a bail fund or a free school or any good shit like that, I would retract everything I said about your parents. Not only that, I would actually change my opinion. I would think differently. OK? Daniel: OK. Sternlight: discards the poster. Sternlight: That's..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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807235e
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It was as if the wars they were conducting were to be symbolized in their own relationships. I thought how contention makes us human. How every form of it is practiced religiously, from gentlemanly debate to rape and pillage, from dirty political attacks to assassinations. Our nighttime street fights outside of bars, our slapping arguments in plush bedrooms, our murderous mutterings in the divorce courts. We had parents who beat their child..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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caf90a4
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By the rules of evidence in this trial the verdict is foreordained. If the testimony ... is admitted as competent, the conspiracy is proved. Because it would not be admitted except under the assumption that a conspiracy existed.... Here ... a defendant can be found guilty of being brought to court as a defendant.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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e374a29
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Implications of treason are fed like cubes of sugar to the twelve-headed animal which is justice. In ... opening remarks. In the way questions are asked. In support of lines of questioning where cases of treason are cited and the Judge endorses the relevance of the citation.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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6847fec
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The images of things are not the things in themselves.
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images
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E.L. Doctorow |
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9a4d003
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The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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70f3cd8
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Nobody doan never have touch Porhl! When I little, de brudder try. Oh yeah. I raise up dis bony knee hard in his what he got dere, and dat were dat and nobody since! You hear dis gul, Mr. free man Jacob Early? And nobody since! An I ain't no Jez'bel, she screamed. In this way was Pearl's decision made, and by the time they were on the march through Milledgeville she was drummer for Clarke's company. She just hit the drum once every other st..
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E.L. Doctorow |
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698507b
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I keep thinking someone will come by sometime who will want to use the wood.
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E.L. Doctorow |
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fe61e96
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Do not play this piece fast It is never right to play Ragtime fast.... --SCOTT JOPLIN
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E.L. Doctorow |