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fd2b540
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Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e23df64
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Although he, like all people, secretely enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was somethig else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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93f050a
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The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn't help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them. Every time Patty lay by herself after sex, she sank down into sadness and loneliness, because Richard was always going to be Richard, whereas with Walter, there had always been the possibility, however faint, and however slow in ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a818d83
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Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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41585c6
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If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2f73b82
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By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and si..
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identity
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c1f6fa5
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Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact. The family was the house's soul.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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25e5e33
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Believe me,' [...] 'I would know about it. That's the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter will be given.
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jealousy
girlfriend
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7807376
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She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4838597
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Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.
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words
literature
reading
writing
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ea04963
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El amor consiste en una empatia ilimitada, surgida de lo que el corazon nos revela, que el otro es tan real como nosotros. Y por eso el amor, segun lo entiendo, siempre es concreto. Intentar amar a toda la humanidad puede ser una empresa loable, pero curiosamente se centra en uno mismo, en el bienestar moral y espiritual de uno mismo. Mientras que para amar a una persona concreta, e identificarse con sus esfuerzos y alegrias como si fueran ..
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love
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Jonathan Franzen |
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01fda8c
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There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite. But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter-- to inflict that version of himself on other people-- was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him. He was also afraid that it mig..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a95d8c7
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She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be "beheaded" someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she'd replaced. Her children were "probably" dying of trichinosis from pork she'd undercooked. She wondered if her "addiction" to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her "never" reading books anymore. She confided t..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d8c654e
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H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]
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simile
mind
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2f0cd8f
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She'd listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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531ab35
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The guiding principle of Martin's personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he'd sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a62260c
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Katz couldn't have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable ago, before the contours of his personality were fully set.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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afae2a3
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The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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27463b5
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Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to..
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war
science
life
spiritual-insights
life-lesson
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bc13ab4
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The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5f84d7d
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Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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43fc25d
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For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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58ea13f
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They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a36c042
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Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8a8124a
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It's something to be anxious about," Manley said, "if you want to be anxious about something."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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9145f5b
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The advisors, on the other hand, were like older brothers and sisters. My favorite was Bill Symes, who'd been a founding member of Fellowship in 1967. He was in his early twenties now and studying religion at Webster University. He had shoulders like a two-oxen yoke, a ponytail as thick as a pony's tail, and feet requiring the largest size of Earth Shoes. He was a good musician, a passionate attacker of steel acoustical guitar strings. He l..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f61068e
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What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in
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home
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bcefdaa
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And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.
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words
literature
reading
books
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Jonathan Franzen |
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dc14e40
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He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ac0f942
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You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.
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professionalism
home
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3266df7
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He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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aea8e64
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To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she'd thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b218361
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The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheever, because Time magazine put them on its cover and Time, for my father, was the ultimate cultural authority. In the last decade, the magazine whose red border twice enclosed the face of James Joyce has devoted covers to Scott Turow and Stephen ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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663b339
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How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5b90436
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When a smoker says he wants to quit but can't, what he's really saying is, "I want to quit but I want even more not to suffer the agony of withdrawal." To argue otherwise is to jettison any lingering notion of personal responsibility."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c744df3
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Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a979ed3
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Not just Negroponte, who doesn't like to read, but even Birkerts, who thinks that history is ending, underestimates the instability of society and the unruly diversity of its members. The electronic apotheosis of mass culture has merely reconfirmed the elitism of literary reading, which was briefly obscured in the novel's heyday. I mourn the eclipse of the cultural authority that literature once possessed, and I rue the onset of an age so a..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bb55c73
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Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was. This futility had let's call it a flavor.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8d8b7dc
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Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan..
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parents
revelation
symbolism
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4aafbe0
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Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There's always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can't. There is some reasonable chance, however, that it could save your soul. If you're unhappy about the hatred that's been unleashed in your heart, you might try imagining what it's like to be the person who hates you; you might consider the possibility that you are, in fact, the Evil One yourse..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b9e5ffb
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Yeah, well, we're all grieving in our own way, obviously. It's just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars." He tried to meet her eyes, but she'd turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. "Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let's see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys--" He snapped his fingers. "Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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555a0a8
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P]art of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn't think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.
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self-knowledge
stupidity
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Jonathan Franzen |
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227f879
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She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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019361e
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Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earne..
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Jonathan Franzen |