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b4d8ac0
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This is a love story, Michael Deane says. But, really, what isn't? Doesn't the detective love the mystery, or the chase, or the nosy female reporter, who is even now being held against her wishes at an empty warehouse on the waterfront? Surely the serial murderer loves his victims, and the spy loves his gadgets or his country or the exotic counterspy. The ice trucker is torn between his love for ice and truck, and the competing chefs go cra..
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Jess Walter |
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42d450a
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And we want car wrecks. We say we don't. But we love them. To look is to love. A thousand people drive past the statue of David. Two hundred look. A thousand people drive past a car wreck. A thousand look.
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Jess Walter |
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58246c5
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Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it.
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publicity
rumors
scandal
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Jess Walter |
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1205c4c
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How do you think it should end?" Young Pasquale considered the question. "Well, instead of going back to America during the war, he could go to Germany and try to kill Hitler." "Ah," Alvis Bender said. "Yes. That is exactly what happens, Pasquale. He gets drunk at a party and everyone warns him not to drive, but he makes a giant scene leaving the party and he jumps in his car and accidentally drives over Hitler."
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Jess Walter |
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98c8e09
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She laughed. 'That's what I love about you good-lookin' blokes. What, me? Have sex?
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Jess Walter |
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0647817
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Even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?
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Jess Walter |
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63ec105
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It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?
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Jess Walter |
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49231b1
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People can handle an unjust world; it's when the world becomes arbitrary and inexplicable that order breaks down.
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Jess Walter |
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a656905
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my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves)
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finance
humor
suicide
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Jess Walter |
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172926f
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What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret?
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Jess Walter |
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982d2a8
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Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love.
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Jess Walter |
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f71234a
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But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start. Do you know what I mean, Pasquale?
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Jess Walter |
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de6f6a9
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First, her father had a minor stroke, giving Claire a glimpse of his mortality and, by extension, her own. And then she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future: a spinster librarian in an apartment full of cats named after New Wave directors. (Godard, leave Rivette's chew toy alone--)
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Jess Walter |
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e4e6c4f
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Oh, the things she would say if she could--but it's a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business.
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Jess Walter |
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856ee98
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All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character--what we believe--none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!
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Jess Walter |
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21e9ab0
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So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dea..
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Jess Walter |
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72b0596
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happy to no longer expect the dead perfection of museum art, but embrace the sweet lovely mess that is real life.
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Jess Walter |
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074acdf
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And if a moment exists only in one's perception anyway, then perhaps the rush of feeling he has now is THE MOMENT, and not merely its shadow. Maybe every moment occurs at once, and they will always be twenty-two, their lives always before them.
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Jess Walter |
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58166e1
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This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life. He needed coffee.
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Jess Walter |
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b4e3d01
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Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth?
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Jess Walter |
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9cfac68
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Another part of Bit's unifying urban theory is sprinklers, that you can gauge a neighborhood's wealth by the way people water. If every house has an automatic system, you're looking at a six-figure mean. If the majority lug hoses around, it's more lower-middle class. And if they don't bother with the lawns... well, that's the sort of shitburg where Bit and Julie always lived, except for that little place they rented in Wenatchee the summer ..
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Jess Walter |
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84b1ea3
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Two kinds of people always lie about their ages: actresses and Latin American pitchers.
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Jess Walter |
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b0c13c6
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has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains?
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Jess Walter |
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c0cbe2b
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I could write for days about the disappointment of politics.
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Jess Walter |
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5506314
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Zo gaat het wanneer je je verliest in dromen, dacht hij: je droomt van het een, je droomt van het ander en voor je het weet heb je je hele leven verslapen.
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Jess Walter |
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cc7dc9e
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The eye sees everything upside down," the artist explained, "and then the brain automatically reverses it. I'm just trying to put it back the way the mind sees it." Alvis"
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Jess Walter |
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5ae445e
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Among the world's evils--fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation-- smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kid's school.
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smoking
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Jess Walter |
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cac19e6
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our lives have a way of eddying back on themselves, offering us the same view over and over, daring us to get it right just once.
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Jess Walter |
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2f04800
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You can't just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It's how people end up married.
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Jess Walter |
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215009d
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Caroline was struck by just how close twenty-four feet really is, how little space really exists between us. Of course they were different, Lenny Ryan's shooting of the pawnbroker, her own shooting of the wife beater. But that meant there was a difference between what Lenny Ryan did and what Kevin Verloc did, that in the end we are separated not by distance, but degree. And in that truth was another; none of us knows, in the tumble of event..
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Jess Walter |
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960d947
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And it's a life with no shortage of moments to recommend it, a life that picks up speed like a boulder rolling down a hill, easy and natural and comfortable, and yet beyond control somehow; it all happens so fast, you wake a young man and at lunch are middle-aged and by dinner you can imagine your death.
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Jess Walter |
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ee9ce0f
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For years. It was as if I was a character in a movie and the real action was about to start at any minute. But I think some people wait forever, and only at the end of their lives do they realize that their life has happened while they were waiting for it to start.
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Jess Walter |
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bd1fd10
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And when our lives do begin? I mean, the exacting part, the action? It's all so fast.
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Jess Walter |
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4487692
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Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts.
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Jess Walter |
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6032cf3
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Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.
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Jess Walter |
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5ebddb4
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mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it. Pasquale waited until the
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Jess Walter |
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135a551
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All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point?
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Jess Walter |
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4ed701f
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It's one thing to know what people want. It's another to CREATE that want in them. To BUILD that desire.
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people
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Jess Walter |
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c21ff13
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You can always spot the real thing, that affection; why does it always come from the wrong person?
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Jess Walter |
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66c0a1e
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Sometimes it was like a deep ache, the simple act of breathing in and out.
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Jess Walter |
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4bf129f
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He found himself inhabiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.
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Jess Walter |
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725e2a0
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There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. --Milan Kundera T
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Jess Walter |
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2e3f266
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Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.
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Jess Walter |
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2fd2258
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Other women were like presents he was constantly disappointed in unwrapping
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Jess Walter |