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Your mother spreads herself for camels.
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When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.
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He'd disposed of her corpse by feeding it to the hogs.
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Earlier you made her sound like a victim. Now she sounds like a villain." "Everybody's both."
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The Players are gentlemen," he'd intoned, "pretending to be actors. The Lambs are actors, pretending to be gentlemen. And the Friars--the Friars are neither, pretending to be both." --
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I went into the bathroom and caught sight of my reflection in the mirror over the sink. All my years looked back at me, and I could feel their weight, pressing down on my shoulders. I ran the shower hot and stood under it for a long time...
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Around one-thirty it started raining lightly. Almost immediately the umbrella sellers turned up on the streetcorners. You'd have thought they had existed previously in spore form, springing miraculously to life when a drop of water touched them.
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You don't sleep. You're thirty-four years old and lost the power to sleep when you were eighteen. Is
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When I decided in my mid-fifties to return to a hobby I'd abandoned twenty years earlier, I didn't know what sort of a collector I'd be. As a boy I'd started out collecting everything, then narrowed my focus to British Empire--specifically, to the Scott Specialty Album for Great Britain, British Europe, and British Oceania. In my mid-twenties I'd begun collecting Benelux as well, and in my mid-thirties, when my first marriage ended, I sold ..
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And was there anything on earth as dangerous as getting everything you ever wanted? As
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Kogda ne znaesh', kto tvoi vragi, prikhoditsia nenavidet' druzei.
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I try to avoid eating endangered species, let alone mythical ones. You
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Oh, I don't believe in anything. I especially don't believe in astrology. Know why?" "Why?" "Because I'm a Saggitarius, and every Sagittarius knows astrology is a lot of hooey."
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Research is a joy, especially when one is not burdened with an excessive reverence for the truth.
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If you are lying, you have built your lie on true foundations.
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Halfway home I stopped at a deli and had soup and a sandwich and coffee. There was a bizarre story in the Post. Two neighbors in Queens had been arguing for months because of a dog that barked in its owner's absence. The previous night, the owner was walking the dog when the animal relieved itself on a tree in front of the neighbor's house. The neighbor happened to be watching and shot at the dog from an upstairs window with a bow and arrow..
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I heard the pitter patter of little old feet.
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For my own part, I'd never live with anyone, male of female. I have trouble enough living with myself.
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Wasn't it Will Rogers who said he never met a man he didn't like?" "Whoever it was, I'd say he didn't get out much."
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Be careful... What the dude said, ain't it? ... One lived in the woods and didn't pay his taxes. Musta been before Lyme disease, when you could still get by with that shit. You know the dude I talkin' about. Said to watch out for jobs you got to dress up for." "Thoreau." "Yeah, that's him."
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jobs
poetry
thoreau
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attract attention. And if they did get out a cry,
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Nobody'd believe a story like yours except a dyke who shaves dogs.
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The Turks have dreary jails.
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that would have hidden the decades of filth that had left their stamp upon the wooden floor.
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When the window turned dark, it was presumably night; when it grew blue again, I guessed that morning had come.
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Breakfast was always a slab of cold black toast and a cup of thick black coffee. Lunch and dinner were always the same--a tin plate piled with a suspicious pilaff, mostly rice with occasional bits of lamb and shreds of vegetable matter of indeterminate origin.
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Keller sat in his hotel room with his purchases on the desk in front of him, pleased with what he'd acquired and the bargain prices he'd paid, but a little bit anxious at having spent so much money. He had dinner again that night with McEwell, and confided some of what he was feeling. "I know what you mean," McEwell said, "and I've been there myself. I remember the first time I paid over a thousand dollars for a single stamp." "It's a miles..
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So where does the human error come in? Well, sometimes I buy a stamp and mount it in my album without troubling to log it in my catalog. And later I find it offered on somebody else's list, and see that it's one I don't have, and buy it again. And then when I go to mount the new copy in my album, there's one already there.
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36.80. So all I have to do is wait and acquire each stamp as it becomes available, right? Well, yes, at least in theory. But what happens, more often than not, is that a stamp I need is grouped in a single lot with one or more other stamps that I don't need. I need French India #39, cataloging 90C/, and it might well be offered in tandem with #38 ($2.40) or #40 ($1.40). Or both of them. Or the lot on offer might consist of #74 ($1.10), #75 ..
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philately is far and away the area of my life where I spend the most time and effort making genuinely inconsequential decisions.
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If you are trying to write realistic fiction and you people it extensively with overdrawn characters, you're working against yourself. You can occasionally get away with filling books and stories with grotesques, but unless your name's Carson McCullers it gets tricky. A less obvious form of caricature consists of giving an otherwise ordinary character a trait or attribute or mannerism on which the reader may focus his attention.
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When I was a kid, buying packets and penny approvals and filling spaces in my Modern Stamp Album, nothing was easier to find and to afford than those German issues. Think of it, a stamp that cost fifty billion marks! And it was mine for a penny!
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Right there! See the blue on its head? See the long tail?" "Oh, there he is," I said, just to bring this little farce to an end. I couldn't see the bird, and I knew I wasn't going to see the bird, and I was rapidly tiring of the whole enterprise. "Beautiful, isn't he?" "Gorgeous," I agreed. "I'd have hated to miss him."
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regummed. A regummed stamp is one which has lost its original gum somewhere along the way, only to have it replaced with new gum. When the equivalent is performed on, say, a Rembrandt oil painting, we call it restoration; when such restoration is performed on a postage stamp, we're more apt to regard it as a crime against nature, and a clear-cut example of philatelic fraud.
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Wait a minute. Can a general worldwide collector care more about some countries than others? Is there a Most-Favored Nation clause in his contract with philately? Ah. Wouldn't you know it? Now I've got a topic for next month's column. . .
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Perhaps I've just mounted the initial stamp on a page that used to be blank. Perhaps I've filled the final space on that page. Or, as is more often the case, perhaps I've added a fifteenth stamp to a page, thus reducing its number of blank spaces from nineteen to eighteen. In any event, I'm looking at progress--and I take a moment to enjoy it.
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After all, doesn't part of philately's attraction lie in the grip it holds on us? It is our eagerness to locate and acquire and add to our albums that testifies to our commitment to the hobby. If we weren't obsessed with stamps, we'd limit our engagement with them to the mailing of an occasional letter, and find other uses for our time and money. We praise a book by stating that we couldn't put it down. So what sort of endorsement is it to ..
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I found the various plebiscite regions of considerable interest before I owned any of their stamps. In the course of remaking the map of Europe after the World War--we wouldn't come to call it World War I until its sequel was upon us--plebiscite elections were held in various disputed regions, to determine the wishes of the inhabitants and settle the matter accordingly. An extraordinary Wilsonian notion, that; the citizenry was to decide fo..
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I was delighted to see them, and wondered at the bargain I'd landed, until I learned enough about them to realize that what I had were Seebecks. One N. F. Seebeck had a contract with the government of Nicaragua to supply the country with stamps, and retained the right to reprint them for the collector market. He apparently did so in great profusion, and one result a century later was that my own personal interest in the stamps of Nicaragua ..
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The accumulator, with his acquisitions stuffed into boxes in no apparent order, is every bit as acceptable a philatelist as the collector trying slowly and painstakingly to fill, with flawlessly centered, post office-fresh examples, all the spaces in a single hingeless album. We're all in this together, and I figure whatever system we devise for ourselves is just fine.
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The House at Sugar Beach, New York Times reporter Helene Cooper's memoir of her girlhood as a member of the Liberian upper crust.
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Now I can't say I approve of counterfeit stamps. But it's hard for me to work up a lot of indignation at a forger who's been dead for the better part of a century. I wouldn't want to buy a fake sold as a genuine stamp, or an official reprint under the illusion that it's an original, but in certain cases and at the right price any of these oddities might find a welcome in my collection. They all make the philatelic universe even more interes..
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Some are errors. There's Malta 20a, for example, the 2-1/2p dull blue; it's supposed to be surcharged "One Penny," but this variety has it "One Pnney." It's affordable, and visually remarkable, and I picked up my copy when it was offered in a block of four, with three non-erroneous companions."
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When I have a look at my own albums, it strikes me how thin they'd be but for war and rebellion.
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