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0364570
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Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7f94a75
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Por que os conservadores, que controlavam todos os tres poderes do governo federal, ainda estavam tao irados - com o ceticismo respeitoso de alguns acerca da guerra do Iraque, com os casais gays que queriam casar, com o afavel Al Gore e a cautelosa Hillary Clinton, com as especies ameacadas e seus defensores, com os impostos e o preco da gasolina que estavam entre os menores de todas as nacoes industrializadas, com a grande imprensa cujos c..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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208dc59
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Il primo minuto della giornata lavorativa ci ricorda tutti gli altri minuti di cui e fatto il giorno, e non e mai bene pensare ai minuti come entita singole.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c79983c
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The fantastic thing about Andreas is he knows the Internet is the greatest truth device ever. And what does it tell us? That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c608375
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the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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9560f42
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The New Regime even recycled the old Republic's buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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426ee6a
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If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprecedentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8d6e884
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The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ca8bda1
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depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship [...] feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibrating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news [...] Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's [...] he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accid..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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789eb98
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Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3950aff
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D'ou venait l'apitoiement sur soi ? Cette quantite extraordinaire d'apitoiement sur soi ? Selon presque tous les criteres possibles, elle menait une vie tres heureuse. Elle avait toutes ses journees pour penser a une facon decente et satisfaisante de vivre, et pourtant tout ce qu'elle semblait recolter avec tous ses choix et toute sa liberte, c'etait de plus en plus de malheur. Du coup, l'autobiographie en arrive presque a la conclusion qu'..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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eb235db
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His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world's splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were hundreds of kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet, yearnings, their innocent entitlement - to wha..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ec86b94
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Your little body had once been deeper inside your mother than your father's dick had ever gone, you'd squeezed your entire goddamned head through her pussy, and then for the longest time you'd sucked on her tits whenever you felt like it, and you couldn't for the life of you remember it. You found yourself self-alienated from the get-go.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e2f89e4
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La gente e venuta in questo paese per cercare soldi o liberta. Se non hai i soldi, ti aggrappi ancora piu rabbiosamente alle tue liberta.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e4fb8ee
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She'd been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6a3bcde
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The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who'd ever truly listened to them.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a224983
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The only decoration on the gray segments of her cubicle was a bumper sticker, AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. Her colleagues' cubicles were covered with photos
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Jonathan Franzen |
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dc4b13d
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And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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50b7e68
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A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them."
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reader-life
reader
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bbd6549
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I had a nightmare about the Averys' sweet-tempered German shepherd, Ina. In the dream, as I was sitting on the floor in the Averys' living room, the dog walked up to me and began to insult me. She said I was a frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking "fag" whose entire life had been phony. I answered her frivolously and cynically and chucked her under the chin. She grinned at me with malice, as if to make clear that she understood me to the co..
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german-shepherd
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Jonathan Franzen |
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69b5a5e
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After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches. He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the prints as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed... cooperation from the world of objects.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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581ce88
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because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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fbdf58a
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Was there anything more sweetly existential than the walking done for sex in the most desolate of streets at three in the morning? The casual slaughter of a reasonable sleep schedule? The strangeness of passing someone's hair-curlered mother in a bathrobe on your way to her heartrendingly hideous bathroom?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0c2fc76
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Que hermosa es siempre la cara que no hemos visto.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ecff830
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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. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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33129f5
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I was very young, and so I know," my mother said. "I know what can happen." "We're not you," Anabel said. "That's what everyone thinks," my mother said. "They think they're not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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aec1878
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You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c6fe843
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She didn't need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bba0874
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Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?" "I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2ce11ba
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A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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76ba13c
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In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it's just human nature
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4aa49db
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They're all about being the special one, the chosen one. 'Only you can save the world from Evil.' That kind of thing. And never mind that specialness stops meaning anything when every kid is special. I remember watching those movies and thinking about all the unspecial characters in the chorus or whatever. The people just doing the hard work of belonging to society. They're the ones my heart really goes out to. The movie should be about the..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e5608ca
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Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else's expense.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e585db6
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In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had tak..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3fde6e6
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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.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3f277c6
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Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ebf966c
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His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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243b98f
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I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus driver's feelings to consider ...
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7b40575
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Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f805531
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Kierkegaard, in 'Either/Or,' makes fun of the 'busy man' for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you're lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there's no end of..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0ae81cd
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My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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81e36b7
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The thing about games is that you don't want to look too closely at why you're playing them. A great yawning emptiness underlies them, a close relative of the nothingness that lies beneath the surface of our busy lives.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ca3487e
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Para mi, el azul mediterraneo ya no es bonito. La transparencia de sus aguas, tan valorada por los veraneantes, es la misma que la de una piscina esteril. En sus playas hay pocos olores y pocas aves, y sus profundidades van camino de vaciarse; gran parte del pescado que ahora se consume en Europa procede ilegalmente, sin que nadie indague mucho, del oceano del oeste de Africa. Miro el azul y no veo un mar, sino una postal, fina como un pape..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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68eadd3
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The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was.
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Jonathan Franzen |