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01a9b8c
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Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?
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Jack Finney |
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6b7a76b
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Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk t..
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present
past
escapist
escapism
modernity
nostalgia
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Jack Finney |
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b322dbe
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So all in all there wasn't anything really wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else's I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn't know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.
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Jack Finney |
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f62524f
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The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer.
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Jack Finney |
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b00551b
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It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.
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instinct
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Jack Finney |
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2a7ece2
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As Einstein himself pointed out. He said we're like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can't see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it's there.
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Jack Finney |
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0b001cc
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If we believe that we are just animals, without immortal souls, we are already but one step removed from pod people.
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Jack Finney |
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6fd20a6
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Would you have references?" "I'm awfully sorry but I haven't. I just arrived in New York, and don't know a soul. Except you." I smiled but she didn't smile back. She stood hesitating, and I said, "It's true that I'm an escaped convict, an active counterfeiter, and occasional murderer. And I howl during the full of the moon. But I'm neat."
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humor
references
tenants
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Jack Finney |
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3afbe99
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The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing," he said reflectively, "but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe--from sub-atomic particles to the universe--except itself."
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Jack Finney |
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1d23351
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He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.
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leadership
intelligence
vision
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Jack Finney |
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34bc153
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Why do you breathe, eat, sleep, make love, and reproduce your kind? Because it's your function, your reason for being. There's no other reason, and none needed.
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Jack Finney |
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3351327
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Relationship building at a distance, through the filter of a computer, is ultimately ineffective for the sincere friend seeker, but it is ideally suited to the sociopath whose powers of manipulation are enhanced when he can operate not merely behind his usual masks but behind an electronic mask as well.
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Jack Finney |
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accc098
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She wasn't actually a girl you'd turn around and look at again, and remember, I suppose; she wasn't actually pretty, I guess you'd have to say. But after I'd talked to her a few times, and had a Coke date once, when I ran into her downtown-then she was pretty.
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Jack Finney |
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c0be062
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And that, my friend, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons.
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Jack Finney |
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84bec01
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You live in the same kind of grayness as the filthy stuff that formed you.
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Jack Finney |
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27c05ef
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But a doctor learns, because he has to, not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. They don't teach that at medical school, but it's as important as your stethoscope.
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Jack Finney |
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faacbd9
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Anyway, there's a time and place for everything, and while this may have been the place, it wasn't the time.
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Jack Finney |
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10c0038
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Labor-saving technology was supposed to give us more leisure time, but a greater percentage of our waking hours is spent in work or work-related tasks than ever before, as we spin like squirrels in exercise cages, desperate to keep current with change and therefore employable.
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Jack Finney |
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5dfbf47
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The sunlight lying on an acre of farm land weighs several tons, believe it or not.
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Jack Finney |
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340002d
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it occurred to me that professors must get so they unconsciously act the way people think professors ought to act;
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Jack Finney |
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00303b5
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She talked all the way back to the office, looking up at me eagerly through her slanted glasses, shoving the hair back off her face. The upper edge of her glasses bisected her right eye, the lower edge bisected the left; and since one lens made half her eye slightly smaller than normal, while the other lens magnified half of the remaining eye, she seemed to have four separate half-eyes of varying sizes, resembling a Picasso painting, and I ..
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Jack Finney |
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8aa4201
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He turned to pull the door closed and the warm air from the hall rushed through the narrow opening again. As he saw the yellow paper, the pencil flying, scooped off the desk and, unimpeded by the glassless window, sail out into the night and out of his life, Tom Benecke burst into laughter and then closed the door behind him.
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inspirational
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Jack Finney |
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68e0876
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I saw my father's wooden filing cabinet, his framed diplomas stacked on top of it, just as they'd been brought from his office. In that cabinet lay records of the colds, cut fingers, cancers, broken bones, mumps, diphtheria, births and deaths of a large part of Mill Valley for over two generations. Half the patients listed in those files were dead now, the wounds and tissue my father had treated only dust.
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Jack Finney |
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e09674c
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inserted
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Jack Finney |
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65d0e76
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the very moment you are caught, there is always a chance.
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Jack Finney |
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df64ff3
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I wrapped his pistol in his cap, and with the butt of the gun--not the end of the butt, but the side--hit him hard on the head. You read a lot about people being hit on the head and knocked out, but you don't read much about blood clots in the brain. In actual fact, though, it's a delicate matter, hitting a man on the head,
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Jack Finney |
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624e911
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Set flush in the wall behind the desk was a steel door. It was knobless, and along one edge were three brass keyholes spaced a few inches apart. Rube brought out a key ring, selected a key, then walked around the desk, inserted the key in the topmost lock, and turned it. From his watch pocket he took a single key, pushed it into the middle keyhole, and turned. The guard stood waiting beside him, and now the guard inserted a key in the botto..
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Jack Finney |
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df46262
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Graustark novels
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Jack Finney |
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f5ec4d4
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I won't let you stay here. Julia, we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radio-active fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army..
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Jack Finney |
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a68c26c
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and--we're all actors by instinct, hams from birth--she
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Jack Finney |
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3c96ffb
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I was pleased at the thought of a girl with a hope chest full of power tools.
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Jack Finney |
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6f6e71b
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I had the evening to kill, but it didn't want to die and fought back.
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Jack Finney |
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a06fa33
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The best thing in our show was always our move to the next town.
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Jack Finney |
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9bbb3c4
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When you've heard one bagpipe tune you've heard them both.
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Jack Finney |