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ed8d9e9
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I'm saying the structure and f the entire culture is flawed, chip said. I'm saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend more money on comp..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bd7bac5
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Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o'clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an absolute groove with her forehand, Jason was bounding around and achieving his own personal-best low error rate, and although her elbow had begun to ache she wanted never to stop. They had impossibly long rallies, back and forth, whack and whack, ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4589f4c
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There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She
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Jonathan Franzen |
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db4a5a6
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You seem a little challenged in the entitlement department. I mean, compared to the others.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bdbecdd
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The love that was a granite impediment at the center of her life was also an unshakable foundation;
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Jonathan Franzen |
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aa220b1
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Un inconvenient del correu electronic es que nomes el pots esborrar una vegada: no pots arrugar-lo, rebotre'l contra el terra, trepitjar-lo, fer-ne mil bocins i cremar-lo. Hi podia haver alguna cosa mes cruel, per part d'algu que t'acabava de rebutjar, que una paciencia compassiva?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0c819a6
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So many . A plague of literary .
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7e7657e
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She was having an outburst with no advance warning.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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09e5f0e
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The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6ccb727
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she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night's approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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fe15b17
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The cold breeze and the cold of Richard's Camel were mixing like joy and remorse.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d6c72c0
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Why I'm dolling myself up like this..." "You're putting on armor. You want to be strong."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d15f3d4
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And meanwhile everybody's wondering what this old woman with half her face drooping onto her shoulder is doing bagging their groceries. You have no idea how I envy you your cubicle. The invisibility of it." "Let's not romanticize the cubicle," Pip said. "This is the terrible thing about bodies. They're so visible, so visible."
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romanticize
visible
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1d942f1
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How terribly easy it had turned out to be to transform naturally occurring uranium into hollow spheres of plutonium, pack the spheres with tritium and surround them with explosives and deuterium, and do it all in such miniature that the capacity to incinerate a million people could fit on the bed of Cody Flayner's pickup.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b0fb6e6
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In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable.
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murder
risk
prison
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8fc3efa
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Never been a washcloth user, no.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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818672a
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Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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60f3048
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If I were fashioning my own killer argument against the digital revolution, I'd begin with the observation that both Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary are crazy about it.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7799626
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young gentleman with whom she's been osculating on
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6274d4b
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The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A paucity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.
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motherhood
love
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0637b9f
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Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning." --
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Jonathan Franzen |
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089bd65
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I know Martin sometimes watches pornography, we don't have secrets from each other, and if he didn't watch it he probably would be the only man in Germany who didn't--I think Internet pornography was designed for German men, because they like to be alone and control things and have fantasies of power. But he says he only watches it because I have so many female Internet friends.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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81f07e1
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An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You'd been talking to your mom since you were one year old and listening to her for even longer, but you couldn't remember a single word of what you or she had said before your hippocampus kicked into gear. Your
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a0bb77b
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He operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever you could get away with;
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e397a42
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And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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50e5ea2
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In the kitchen Enid dredged the Promethean meat in flour and laid it in a Westinghouse electric pan large enough to fry nine eggs in ticktacktoe formation.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5d41082
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Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d1434da
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He reminded me of a beaver, all uncorrected overbite and senseless industry.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a416615
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In the rearview mirror were the evangelical churches, the Tea Party precincts, the Whataburgers. Ahead, the gas and oil wells, the fracking rigs, the overgrazed ranges, the feedlots, the depleted aquifer. Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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11220a5
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Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c375f43
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It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5ebc7c3
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Respectless and depraved, maybe. But happily respectless, happily depraved.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ec8e539
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Google and Accurint can make you feel very smart, but the best stories come when you're out in the field.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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11b2c89
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The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn't do today really could be put off until tomorrow.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0595d2c
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Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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26dc761
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Infinitesimally soon, the eternity of his own death would commence and render all of this unreal.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1596ba7
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You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It's remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I'm the only one who gets to see you on the floor.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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93fcffa
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Her body looked to be only a healthy diet and some regular exercise away from greatness,
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0380570
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He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. ("Sixty's too bright," he said, "and forty is too dim."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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12c6070
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He blamed her both for liking his mother and for
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3328cf8
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Stevia does something funny to the chemistry of my mouth. There's no fooling a taste bud, in my experience.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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81e2cb2
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You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art--an art of invisibility.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6bf6b3a
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She was like a bank too big in her mother's economy to fail,
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2a68e16
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Not only had Mr. Butcavage's questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.
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Jonathan Franzen |