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b18af8c
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The apparatchiks, too, were an eternal type. The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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cfb55b4
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How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're j..
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relationship
secret
trust
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e4026bf
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Kluger notes that these cases arguably amount to "personal injury claims in disguise," and that the Supreme Court has ruled that federal cigarette-labeling laws are an effective shield against such claims. Logically, in other words, the states ought to be suing smokers, not cigarette makers. And perhaps smokers, in turn, ought to be suing Social Security and private pension funds for all the money they'll save by dying early."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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76edeae
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Gary si augurava che ogni ulteriore migrazione verso le coste venisse proibita, e tutti gli abitanti del Midwest fossero incoraggiati a tornare ai cibi pesanti, agli abiti fuori moda e ai giochi di societa, in modo da mantenere una riserva nazionale strategica di idiozia
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Jonathan Franzen |
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94ac703
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He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Ubermensch and "the Singularity's chosen avatar,"
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john-mcafee
silicon-valley
venture-capitalist
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f8de747
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No one stays haunted by a person they're not still in love with.
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love
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5d98112
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Y se fue. Y ella se convirtio en mejor lectora.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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784ac86
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It was this other side of Avery - the fact that he so visibly had an other side - that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b5baa29
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There's something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemistry is altered for the rest of your life? That's what stevia tastes like to me." "I'm not sitting here puffing on a meth stem, if that's what you're trying to say."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e0dd6a3
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Attempting to write an honest essay doesn't alter the multiplicity of my selves. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0c23ec3
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Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death:
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c816c86
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People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don't have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can't afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6faf70e
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Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression disappears, the aesthetic stigma increases. It's not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It's the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you're either healthy or you're sick, you either function or you don't. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what's depressing you, you're inclined to ..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3994777
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I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter. Does that make any sense?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ee60153
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On the other hand, some of the family's impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you've made an error; with the post office..
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post-office
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Jonathan Franzen |
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578a27f
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No existe nadie cuya personalidad real nos guste hasta la ultima particula. Por eso, un mundo donde todo consiste en gustar es en ultima instancia una mentira. Pero si existe la persona de cuya personalidad real uno ama hasta la ultima particula. Y por eso el amor representa tal amenaza existencial para el orden del tecnoconsumismo: Saca a la luz la mentira
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2ff48c6
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my chances with moral vanity," Stephen interrupted, "when the alternative is"
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a2e1d83
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Patty comecou a chorar por motivos que se sentia triste demais para examinar.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8551a21
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I tell you everything." "Nothing that matters."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6645e57
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Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else's Ping-Pong.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5c991a1
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Pip's mother's lane was spongy with redwood needles dislodged and sodden with the rain, the sound of which surrounded her polyrhythmically, a steady background patter, heavier drippings, hiccuping gurgles. The musty wood-soak smell of Valley wetness overwhelmed her with sense-memory.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c11aa02
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Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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7ded926
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To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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df9f12b
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And yet there's other species even closer to zero. I know that. And I hope to God somebody else is worrying about 'em. I often ask myself, would I slit my own throat if I was guaranteed I could save one species by slitting it? We all know one human life is worth more than one bird's life. But is my miserable little life worth a whole species?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6949aa6
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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 ever experienced before? You see things more clearly and you KNOW that you're seeing them more cl..
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grief
growth
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Jonathan Franzen |
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c95edc1
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Charles was at the apex of his career, coming off a Lannan Fellowship year and a front-page Times review that had anointed him as the heir of John Barth and Stanley Elkin, but he didn't know it was the apex.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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eafb676
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The cabin was dark. Inside it was the sound of her childhood, the patter of rain on a roof that consisted only of shingle and bare boards, no insulation or ceiling. She associated the sound with her mother's love, which had been as reliable as the rain in its season. Waking up in the night and hearing the rain still pattering the same way it had when she'd fallen asleep, hearing it night after night, had felt so much like being loved that t..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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0419cf7
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It seems important to cling to the concrete, to remember that illness is not a metaphor or a study but a phenomenon unfolding in (and on) real bodies in real rooms. Its qualia, the crinkly paper hospital gown and metallic adrenaline taste, the mutable and inexpressible shades of pain, demand articulation because they matter. We work so hard at telling others what it is like to be sick in whichever particular way we are sick; we are reassure..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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df68373
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Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity--
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6b601f7
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with nothing left to relish or discover, he just might die of boredom. Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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fea4d81
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Ima toliko Dzonatana. Prava poplava knjzevnih Dzonatana. Kad bi citala Njujork tajms buk rivju, pomislila bi da je to najcesce musko ime u Americi. Sinonim za velicinu i talenat. Za ambiciju i vitalnost." Podigao je obrvu i pogledao Pip. ,,A Zejdi Smit? Sjajno stivo, zar ne?" --
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3c42826
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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 Andreas (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
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Jonathan Franzen |
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74350e5
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Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f6199c4
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Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term."
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Jonathan Franzen |
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615afff
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A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a "sense" that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn't save you." --
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f2f1761
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Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the ti..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3de8021
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His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of
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Jonathan Franzen |
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503e49c
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Esa no era la persona que el creia ser, o la que habria elegido ser si hubiera tenido la libertad de elegir, pero habia algo reconfortante y liberador en ser una persona real y definida, y no una coleccion de personas potenciales y contradictorias.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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029f019
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him under house arrest was in his head. Hearing
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3da5218
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I segreti erano potere. I soldi erano potere. Essere necessari a qualcuno era potere. Potere, potere, potere: com'era possibile che il mondo girasse intorno alla lotta per una cosa che creava solitudine e angoscia in chi la possedeva?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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9533758
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The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it. He
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Jonathan Franzen |
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aa93901
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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 even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental 'health' is the ability to p..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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be46eff
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el amor verdadero altera el mundo del tecnoconsumismo, y a este no le queda mas remedio que alterar, a su vez, el amor.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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cf8c329
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Si uno dedica su existencia a gustar, y si adopta la imagen atractiva necesaria para ello, sea la que sea, se suele creer que uno ha desistido de ser querido por ser quien es en realidad. Y si uno consigue manipular a los demas para gustarles, sera dificil no sentir cierto desprecio por esas personas, ya que han caido en el engano.
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Jonathan Franzen |