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f04f04f
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There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c88ebf7
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Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we've built for ourselves, here in these ha..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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7b3117c
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He has no interest in comics. He doesn't understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats.
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graphic-novels
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6fd3e39
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adulthood's full of ghosts." "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite--" "I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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9fc50c8
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There'd been an epidemic, the man had told him. Thirty people had died incandescent with fever, including the mayor. After this, a change in management, but the tuba's acquaintance had declined to elaborate on what he meant by this. He did say that twenty families had left since then, including Charlie and the sixth guitar and their baby. He said no one knew where they'd gone, and he'd told the tuba it was best not to ask.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a46960c
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They acted because they loved acting, but also, let's be honest here, to be noticed. All they wanted was to be seen.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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cf4f6b8
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It occurred to Clark that he should call someone, actually everyone, that he should call everyone he'd ever loved and talk to them and tell them all the things that mattered, but it was apparently already too late for this, his phone displaying a message he'd never seen before: SYSTEM OVERLOAD EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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19980f8
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I don't really remember what computer screens looked like,
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f59852a
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There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e63e5d2
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Survival might be insufficient, she'd told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare. He'd trotted out his usual arguments, about how Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Traveling Symphony. But look, she'd told him, the difference was that they'd seen electricity, they'd seen everything, they'd watched a civilization collapse, and Shakespeare hadn't. In Shakespe..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fc952e8
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This one's my other favorite. 'He's successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it's low-hanging fruit. He takes a high-altitude view, but he doesn't drill down to that level of granularity where we might actions new opportunities.' Clark winced. 'I remember that one. I think I may have had a minor stroke in the office when he said that.' 'It raises questions,' Garrett said. 'It certainly does.' 'There ar..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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82d0ccb
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he's got a terrible marriage and doesn't want to go home, and don't ask how I know that, everyone knows when you've got a terrible marriage, it's like having bad breath, you get close enough to a person and it's obvious.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c001b1a
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Station Eleven is the size of Earth's moon and was designed to resemble a planet, but it's a planet that can chart a course through galaxies and requires no sun. The station's artificial sky was damaged in the war, however, so on Station Eleven's surface it is always sunset or twilight or night. There was also damage to a number of vital systems involving Station Eleven's ocean levels, and the only land remaining is a series of islands that..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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846e40c
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You've actually just reminded me. I brought you something." She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her handbag, and passed them across the table."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f4132b2
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Some people had mixed feelings about this - they'd obviously been abandoned here, everyone was hungry and 911 wasn't even operational; on the other hand, no one wants to be a thief - but then a business traveler named Max said, "Look, everyone just chill the fuck out, I'll cover it with my Amex."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a6525e2
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Because survival is insufficient,
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ce541fc
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Dieter walked a little ahead of the other actors, murmuring to his favourite horse. The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e76cf79
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They call themselves the light." "What about it?" "If you are the light," she said, "then your enemies are darkness, right?" "I suppose." "If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there's nothing that you cannot justify. There's nothing you can't survive, because there's nothing that you will not do."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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36cf2c9
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If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d3ca624
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He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he'd jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them - I'm sorry, I've just realized that I'm as minimally present in this world as you are, I had no right to judge -
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clark-thompson
iphone-people
jostled
minimally-present
no-right-to-judge
sidewalk
iphone
judging-people
judging
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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451b260
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A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead--I see you, I see you--and hoped this was enough.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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604b2fd
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It is sometimes necessary to break everything.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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165b686
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No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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8889660
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This is going to seem bitter but I don't mean it that way, V., I'm just stating a fact here: you'll only ever call me if I call you first. Have you noticed that? If I call and leave a message you'll call me back, but you will never call me first. And I think that's kind of a horrible thing, V., when you're supposed to be someone's friend. I always come to you. You always say you're my friend but you'll never come to me and I think I have to..
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friends
expectations
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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918e623
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A or B, two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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03953b1
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She started to explain her project to him again but the words stopped in her throat. "You don't have to understand it," she said. "It's mine."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a326b12
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SOMETIMES THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night. At other times it seemed a difficult and dangerous way to survive and hardly worth it, especially at times when they had to camp between towns, when they were turned away at gunpoint from hostile plac..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1d897eb
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He had decided before the accident not to chase them anymore, but the circumstances of the accident made him fear for Lilia's safety. he would never bring her in, not anymore; all he wanted now was to watch over her. Michaela had been reading his notes for years, but his notes were only part of it: the other part was the way he woke up at night in his bed in Montreal and knew where Lilia was, the way he could glance at a map of the United S..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b3eb6fa
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He was half-naked in the bed, lying like a starfish. After she got up he always liked to see how much of the bed he could sleep on at once.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a3bcbe5
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Sixty dollars later Jeevan was alone outside his brother's apartment door, the carts lined up down the corridor. Perhaps, he thought, he should have called ahead from the grocery store. It was one a.m. on a Thursday night, the corridor all closed doors and silence. "Jeevan," Frank said when he came to the door. "An unexpected pleasure." "I..." Jeevan didn't know how to explain himself, so he stepped back and gestured weakly at the carts ins..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6ff532d
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Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn't noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn't yet known that everything was coming undone.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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80c8868
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There is only here, she told herself, there is only this house.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1033056
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I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e6fd9cf
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I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliche but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the mai..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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29057d4
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Kirsten and August walked mostly in silence. A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d874b3d
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Hell is the absence of the people you long for. 24 ON THEIR SECOND DAY without the Symphony, Kirsten and August came upon a line of cars, queued along the shoulder of the road. It was late morning and the heat was rising, a hush falling over the landscape. They'd lost sight of the lake. The cars cast curved shadows.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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43563e2
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Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, as in revenge, have sucked up from the sea contagious fogs...." Pestilential, a note in the text explains, next to the word contagious, in Kirsten's favorite of the three versions of the text that the Symphony carries. Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague close..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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80c4415
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Uberleben allein ist unzureichend
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b849fa5
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O inferno e a ausencia das pessoas que nos faltam.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4950c5b
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OK, suponhamos que vai a copa - disse ela -, e duas pessoas que quem gosta estao la, suponhamos que uma das pessoas esta a contar uma historia divertida, voce ri-se um pouco, sente-se incluido, toda a gente tem tanta graca, e volta para a sua secretaria com uma especie de, nao sei, brilho, mas depois as quatro ou cinco da tarde o dia transformou-se em apenas mais um, e continua assim, a ansiar pelas cinco da tarde e depois pelo fim de seman..
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unforgettable
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c8156c9
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They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0192a79
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Ha dinheiro, pedacos de papel que podem ser trocados por qualquer coisa: casas, barcos, dentes perfeitos.
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unforgettable
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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3b6731e
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She was thinking about the way she'd always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place,
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6133543
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Clark observa a actividade nocturna na pista, os avioes que estao parados a vinte anos, o reflexo da sua vela bruxuleante no vidro. Nao tem esperanca de ver um aviao levantar voo novamente no seu tempo de vida, mas sera possivel que nalgum lugar haja navios a partirem? Se houver cidades com iluminacao publica, se existem sinfonias e jornais, que mais pode conter este mundo que agora desperta? Talvez haja navios a icar velas neste preciso mo..
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unforgettable
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Emily St. John Mandel |