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77e8212
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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.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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00e3884
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Imagine the state of distrust in which I move through the world. Revealing anything shameful to anyone, I run the risk of exposure, censure, mockery. Everyone should be told this about fame before they start pursuing it: you will never trust anyone again. You will be a kind of damned person, not only because you can't trust anyone but, still worse, you must always be considering how important you are, how newsworthy, and this divides you fr..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4c61bdf
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It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who'd stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1e26018
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I hate America," she said. "I thought Obama would change things, but it's still just guns, drones, Guant"
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Jonathan Franzen |
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dc24e6f
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He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn't understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it. And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d8d5e99
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The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4b81dae
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she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dus..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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77a6ccf
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Katz could see that Patty, in the seemingly random life-meanderings that Walter had just described to him, had in fact deliberately been trampling symbols in a cornfield, spelling out a message unreadable to Walter at ground level but clear as could be to Katz at great height. IT'S NOT OVER, IT'S NOT OVER.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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9844894
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It was Andreas's gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6a733bb
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She saw a planet on which there were still seventeen thousand nukes, probably enough to wipe vertebrate life off the face of it, and thought This can't be good.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bc9a158
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I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator's jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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abc009c
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a "marketing psychologist" and who advised Chip, now, to wake up and do the same), he returned to his car and discovered that each of his plastic-wrapped cheeses was protected by its own antitheft badge and that, indeed, a fragment of antitheft badge had stuck to the bottom of his left shoe. Tilton"
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Jonathan Franzen |
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82009fd
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The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.)
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4b6d58e
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It didn't feel so bad to be an orphan. It felt like the first day of a long vacation, a day as empty as the January sky was clear and sunny.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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31932e2
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A contact low.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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07bb7d5
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I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I'm alive now. And I can live deliberately. I've paid the price, I've done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. "And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight--isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a comp..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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81f58aa
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cut back on my own work, passing up an opportunity to follow the Dukakis campaign for Rolling Stone, and I was losing friends the way addicts do, by canceling dates at the last minute.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bb19d27
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she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dus..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8c176d9
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Invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you're on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f3a5a59
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We'd been little more than children when we fell in love. Now everything was ashes, ashes of ashes burned at temperatures where ash burns, but our full-fledged sex life had only just begun, and I would never stop loving her. It was the prospect of another two or three or five years of sex in the ashes that made me think of death. When she pulled away from me and dropped to her knees and unzipped my knapsack and took out my Swiss Army knife,..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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fc5cf87
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Sex with a squirrel who had exciting breasts beneath her little-kid pajamas was not without its appeal,
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5936cd7
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In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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eb40f9c
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Ever since he'd discovered a secret passageway out of self-alienation, in the form of giving himself pleasure while also receiving it, he'd increasingly resented any activity that took him away from it.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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175c95b
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To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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47ba3ca
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And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a391eca
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The soul,' he said to Pip, 'is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is a glorified . Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it's designed to interact with. And can an enzyme be ? Does it have a ? I say yes to both questions! What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better. That's what I've become, a , floating..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b9d60ca
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And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight--isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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43c7c49
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That this was what jail was for: people who believed that they, rather than society, made the rules.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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cef2bca
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The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new "product" without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the "product," they didn't vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn't make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept ha..
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capitalism
success
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Jonathan Franzen |
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69b80b1
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The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she'd ever done.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ef5d790
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Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers. Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ab7e0d8
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he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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52c4e7d
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neurochemically, obsessive-compulsive disorder bears a conspicuous resemblance to falling in love. Scientists have scanned the brains of the pathologically obsessive and held them up next to brain scans of the love-struck, and the images turned colors in the same places. Doctors drew blood and found the same chemical imbalances--namely, a serotonin deficit.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0efa183
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The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5ac72a9
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God damn you!" Alfred said. "You belong in jail!" The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drip on the sheets below. "Seems to me," it said, "you anal retentive type personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put 'em in the slammer! ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5d448fa
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Weak people hold grudges, Mom. Strong people forgive.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d235034
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For David Shenk, the most important of the "windows onto meaning" afforded by Alzheimer's is its slowing down of death. Shenk likens the disease to a prism that refracts death into a spectrum of its otherwise tightly conjoined parts--death of autonomy, death of memory, death of self-consciousness, death of personality, death of body--and he subscribes to the most common trope of Alzheimer's: that its particular sadness and horror stem from ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0d91656
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Mephistopheles: Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! "It's over now!" What's that supposed to mean? It's as good as if it never was."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6799e96
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He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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589074d
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He'd realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0313f5f
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The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she'd been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She remembered a college professor explaining why all the colors the human eye could see could be represented by a tw..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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08a0954
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It's true I'm male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with smaller animals and won't accept that it was born to kill them, is to betray its nature and starve to death. But maybe it's like something else--like being born with more money than others. Then the right thing to do becomes a more interesting..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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75dafe8
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Taken together, the animals reminded Pip that she was an animal herself; the multitude of shames she'd left behind in Oakland seemed of smaller consequence at Los Volcanes.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c1f7ac4
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Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andrea (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten. In the Republic, people had been terrified of the sta..
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Jonathan Franzen |