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448bfe9
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The chill lowered my defenses, and I caught a fever. A fever to understand.
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Francine Prose |
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3070722
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A neighbor once told me he had trouble with Garcia Marquez's novel because he likes to drink while he reads, and 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' gave him no space in which to take a sip of his beer.
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reading
reading-habits
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Francine Prose |
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94c57da
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Sometimes only in retrospect do we realize that we have wasted our best years looking for a lost, inappropriate first love, that our life-changing passion for a particular person was no more than the desire to finally kiss the crooked lower lip of an elementary school principal or the boy on whom we had an unrequited childhood crush.
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Francine Prose |
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ac66196
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Yvonne had created this place for her and for others like her: born into the wrong life, the wrong body, an innocent victim of God's mistake.
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Francine Prose |
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55367aa
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The Nazis understood how useful it was to prevent the camp guards from identifying with the prisoners, to emphasize the otherness, the difference of the people whom the boxcars brought to Sobibor and Treblinka.
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Francine Prose |
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e2f2614
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I've always thought that a close-reading course should at least be a companion, if not an alternative, to the writing workshop. Though it also doles out praise, the workshop most often focuses on what a writer has done wrong, what needs to be fixed, cut, or augmented. Whereas reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing us how a writer does something brilliantly.
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Francine Prose |
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9133d5f
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Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.
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Francine Prose |
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b4098cd
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I heard he went home to Poughkeepsie and moved back in with his mom.
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Francine Prose |
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e8adfbd
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But love is strange, as they used to say at the Chameleon Club. Even those of us who value intelligence over appearance have discovered, to our chagrin, that a high IQ doesn't necessarily translate into kindness or even conscience.
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lovers
relationships
love
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Francine Prose |
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d715fcc
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Maybe real love is being able to ask, Do I have greens in my teeth?
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love
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Francine Prose |
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7538235
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Nabokov, Heinrich von Kleist, Raymond Carver, Jane Bowles, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant--the list goes on and on. They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me with the energy and courage it takes to sit down at a desk each day and resume the process of learning, anew, to write.
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Francine Prose |
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ec89680
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I have one outstanding trait in my character, which must strike anyone who knows me for any length of time, and that is my self-knowledge. I can watch myself and my actions, just like an outsider.
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Francine Prose |
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11dd70b
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Reader, I married him. It turned out the sounds I heard coming from the attic weren't the screams of Mr Rochester's mad wife Bertha. It wasn't the wife who burned to death in the fire that destroyed Thornfield Hall and blinded my future husband when he tried to save her. After we'd first got engaged, he'd had to admit that he was already married, and we'd broken off our engagement. He'd asked me to run away with him anyway. Naturally, I'd r..
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mr-rochester
parrot
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Francine Prose |
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5f05b70
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Love is blooming on the riverbanks, in the alleys of Montmartre. Park benches exist for lovers exhausted by excessive kissing.
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Francine Prose |
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ab24b92
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Don't come to Paris if you're planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert.
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Francine Prose |
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986f8ff
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Don't order boeuf bourguignon if you're a vegetarian, don't venture into the tearooms if you don't like ladies with lapdogs. Don't come to Paris if you're planning a solitary hike through a sexual desert.
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Francine Prose |
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dfbe164
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Hemingway should have stayed in the Midwest. He ruined things for the rest of us, telling all those lies. The lie about courage, the lie about every red-blooded male needing to kill a bull or climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
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Francine Prose |
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4e4b389
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One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower?
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Francine Prose |
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7727996
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Two: Distract yourself. Paris has something for everyone. Let's imagine you are feeling slightly disenchanted with women. Dozens of places will persuade you that a beautiful woman is nothing more than a beautiful man in a dress.
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Francine Prose |
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9585519
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But did I ever get over her? She came to symbolize everything I wanted and would never have.
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Francine Prose |
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22837bc
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Many people have a gift for language that flows when they are talking and dries up when they are confronted with the blank page,
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Francine Prose |
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9196135
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You think, Fuck it. The guy's a genius. He deserves her. What is a woman, after all? You are alive and in Paris.
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Francine Prose |
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be6c185
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Yes to it all. I had become a puppy that stands on its hind legs and barks when its master fetches its leash.
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Francine Prose |
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6637501
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I was only pretending to be the underpaid, duplicitous, ineffective, struggling teacher of immigrant French. The real Suzanne was the lover and muse of a brilliant artist.
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Francine Prose |
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eaf552a
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I wanted to know what he thought about my loving a man whose bills were being paid by another woman.
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Francine Prose |
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0008262
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I was trying to communicate--with nothing so obvious as a smile, but let's say a smile of the eyes--my admiration for the chic of women in tuxedos escorting women in evening gowns.
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Francine Prose |
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d7107c7
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If I were like Lionel, I would write a book: Obvious Lies, Bad Advice, and Wrong Information I've Gotten from Men. A book? An encyclopedia! But in this case my friend was right.
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Francine Prose |
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3da88f0
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Staying awake seemed like a gift until, as so often happens with gifts, it became a burden.
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Francine Prose |
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751bfea
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How ashamed most of us would be, if we were reminded of some past behavior, some attitude that we maintained while under the delusion that we were in love--and were loved in return.
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Francine Prose |
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6c1014c
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He claimed to be a Marxist, the only one of his claims I believed. He had that Marxist passion for oysters and good Sancerre, and that Marxist paralysis when the waiter brought the check. Already it's obvious how much the Communists got wrong, overbetting on human high-mindedness, lowballing human desire.
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marxism
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Francine Prose |
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d836b10
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In part what made the club such a haven was its power to make each person feel temporarily less alone.
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Francine Prose |
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c100eb2
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She told me the French expression [Esprit de l'escalier]--the spirit of the staircase--for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with the perfect answer you didn't think of. We even had our own code phrase: SOS, we called it.
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timing
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Francine Prose |
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b08bf24
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Anne tells him that his silence is, in a way, like her chatter.
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Francine Prose |
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669b94f
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But briefly, Theresa's case has been diagnosed as one of acute hallucinatory psychosis, brought on by a particularly difficult and prolonged adolescent psychosexual adjustment, no doubt aggravated by a somewhat obsessional religious nature. What that means in layman's terms is--as I'm sure you know--Theresa has temporarily lost touch with what we call reality.
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Francine Prose |
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460d52e
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from the earliest passages to the diary's final entry, in which she talks about her "dual personality," the lighthearted, superficial side that lies in wait to ambush and push away her "better, deeper, and purer" self."
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Francine Prose |
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4a2be10
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illness of Bep's father--bad news that makes her want to fall asleep as a release from thinking.
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Francine Prose |
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c7788ac
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is starting to happen between the two teenagers: "It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips...and with my whole heart I almost beseeched him: oh, tell me, what is going on inside you, oh, can't you look beyond this ridiculous chatter?"
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Francine Prose |
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6e63c0e
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Aware of how often she hides her good qualities because she is afraid of being misunderstood or mocked, she accuses herself of being uncharitable, supercilious,
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Francine Prose |
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9aec733
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The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the cliches and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversation, cannot and should not be used when our characters are talking. Rather, they should speak more fluently than we do, with greater economy and certitude.
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Francine Prose |
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d2a3edd
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If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it's just as if a little light goes on inside me.
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Francine Prose |
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fab70f6
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In the spring of 2007, a staging of Kesselman's version, directed by Tina Landau at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, seems to have maximized its potential.
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Francine Prose |
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abbd16c
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I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if...there weren't any other people living in the world.
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Francine Prose |
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aee69e0
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The ocean knew where her sailor was. We have seen him, said the waves. He is sleeping with us. You will never kiss his lips or feel the weight of his body again.
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Francine Prose |
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a101cbc
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Her mother had responded in kind, and the result was "unpleasantness and misery rebounding all the time."
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Francine Prose |