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fefd39e
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Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit." "Yeah?" He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. "You can have it. I'm giving it to you. After I'm gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I'm making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. Ther..
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writing
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Michael Chabon |
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dd84d95
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This is in my opinion why writers--like insomniacs--are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.
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Michael Chabon |
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7f8b128
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There is only one sure means in life," Deasey said, "of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money."
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money
futility
disillusion
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Michael Chabon |
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c8e633f
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Oops
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humor
mistress-of-the-night
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Michael Chabon |
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07a3039
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His illusions about American decency had not survived the reading of American history.
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Michael Chabon |
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b15f6e7
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silence was darkness, and that naming shone a light.
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Michael Chabon |
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c799194
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And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.
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Michael Chabon |
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b5c15fa
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Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect.
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Michael Chabon |
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cd174a9
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grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For
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Michael Chabon |
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f3a6096
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People notice only what you tell them to notice," he said. "And then only if you remind them."
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Michael Chabon |
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61e770b
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I'm always thrilled," wrote Alan Cheuse, emphasizing the novelty and, perhaps, the faint air of slumming that attends the notion of McCarthy's move to the science-fiction neighborhood, "when a fine writer of first-class fiction takes up the genre of science fiction and matches its possibilities with his or her own powers." --
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Michael Chabon |
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f80fc7d
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We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place;
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Michael Chabon |
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16f966b
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On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Feud painting his cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Audi full of rash behavior that lay ahead, the detonating summer; and because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second.
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Michael Chabon |
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78a7f71
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Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe--a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a contain..
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Michael Chabon |
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8e434c8
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The elegant black-and-white ship, all 24,170 tons of it, loomed like a mountain in a dinner jacket.
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Michael Chabon |
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1c7d1a5
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I resign," says Velvel. He takes off his glasses, slips them into his pocket, and stands up. He forgot an appointment. He's late for work. His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch."
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Michael Chabon |
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2585799
|
Comic books actually are inferior," Sammy said. "I really do believe that. It's--it's just built in to the material. We're talking about a bunch of guys--and a girl--who run around in their long johns punching people, all right?"
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Michael Chabon |
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6c3c5ba
|
It was at these times that he began to understand, after all these years of study and performance, of feat and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyo..
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Michael Chabon |
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e114db8
|
That's why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that's all I do in life, keep track of my errors.
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life
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Michael Chabon |
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7e0c2c8
|
On a clear night in blacked-out countryside, in between bomber runs, when the tracer fire ceased and the searchlights went dark, the stars did not fill the sky so much as coat it like hoarfrost on a windowpane. You looked up and saw The Starry Night, he told me; you realized that Van Gogh was a realist painter.
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Michael Chabon |
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4945cb0
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The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details.
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Michael Chabon |
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ba41bf0
|
Love is like falconry," he said. "Don't you think that's true, Cleveland?" "Never say love is like anything." said Cleveland. "It isn't."
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Michael Chabon |
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831545f
|
What I came to dislike about Little League that spring was not the regulation per se, or the fathers--whose consciousness had generally been raised at least a little bit--or the tedium, or the low quality of play, or the pain of watching my son strike out a lot. It was the way I got reminded, every game, that this was the world my children lived in: the world in which the wild watershed of childhood had been brought fully under control of t..
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fatherhood
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Michael Chabon |
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b39a881
|
Midwives' experience of fathers is incidental but proficient, like a farmer's knowledge of bird migration or the behavior of clouds.
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Michael Chabon |
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774e7af
|
Like everyone else in the show, Max avoided the Ogre, despising him as the lowest of the freaks, until one fateful night when his insomnia was eased by an unexpected strain of Mendelssohn that came wafting across the soft Manitoba summer night. Max went in search of the source of the music and was led, to his astonishment, to the misterable iron wagon at the back of the fairgrounds. In the moonlight he read three short words: SEE THE OGRE! ..
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Michael Chabon |
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58b5f7d
|
Take care--there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.
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Michael Chabon |
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9815546
|
I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox.
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stinksburgh
the-worst-city-on-earth
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Michael Chabon |
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8cb9f0e
|
Sara hadn't the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deinotherian body might have on a man.
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Michael Chabon |
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ee86377
|
It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress.
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Michael Chabon |
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2767deb
|
He didn't say anything. He lay there with his eyes closed for a long time after that, sculling along the surface of the sea of pain a little nearer to his story's end or maybe, if that great eschatologist Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun turned out to be right, toward story on the opposite shore that was waiting to begin.
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Michael Chabon |
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7a97968
|
and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought that being alone was what he needed.
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Michael Chabon |
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61bc242
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They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad.
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Michael Chabon |
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b4d5a47
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He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people's bad decisions along with his own.
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Michael Chabon |
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7d2c4f8
|
He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin.
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Michael Chabon |
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fdd0807
|
Mr. Casamonaca nodded genially and made a looping benedictory gesture in the air, just in front of his face, more ornate than a cross, as if he were a priest in a sect whose symbol was the holy coat hanger of God.
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Michael Chabon |
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a1c3a18
|
It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal.
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Michael Chabon |
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5441394
|
Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment. Cats
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Michael Chabon |
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24427a3
|
His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.
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Michael Chabon |
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10f4d12
|
I have a boyfriend now. A real one. We're totally dating, it's very strange.
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Michael Chabon |
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8b1381b
|
The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.
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Michael Chabon |
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075bb2b
|
I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I like what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude toward God, that dictatorial and arbitrary old fuck with his curses and his fiats and his yen for the smell of burnt shoulder meat.
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Michael Chabon |
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a8392c9
|
Le facce dei bambini erano stupite, esitanti. Il lento, triste, oscuro sottomarino che trasportava il carico delle loro vite, era improvvisamente emerso in superficie. Nel loro sangue ora circolava disordinatamente l'azoto della meraviglia. Nessuno rideva o sorrideva, ma si sa che quando si divertono davvero, i bambini sono sempre seri.
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Michael Chabon |
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0b53e84
|
You hit me with a tuba," he said, looking at me with an air of hurt surprise. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry." A sheet of paper came whistling up and flattened itself against my"
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Michael Chabon |
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d434e23
|
Defiantly serving out the inhumane term of a punishment she had imposed on herself, confusing obedience with rebellion and vindication with endurance. "Come," he told her. "Put your costume" --
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Michael Chabon |