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c3942eb
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I wasn't unkind to him. I just didn't talk to him. I didn't talk to anybody, and I didn't want anybody talking to me. That was the plan.
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Michael Chabon |
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037867a
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A few peace activists, looking like peace activists all over the world, young, unassailable, and romantic, hand out roses. The message is old, the gesture likewise: the flower as a sign of good. There's a flaw in the symbolism, however, a permanent gash in this goodness: the flower withers. It lives for a moment. Then it withers in your hands.
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Michael Chabon |
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2615d6a
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The hair on the back of the neck stood erect and you ran, in spite of yourself, ribs ringing with panic, certain as a child running up the cellar stairs that something very bad was after you.
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Michael Chabon |
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764739c
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The old man had been stoking and sipping at his pipe for the last fifteen minutes as they awaited the prisoner. The smoke of his tobacco was the foulest that she, a girl raised in a house with seven brothers and a widowed father, had every been obliged to inhale. It hung in the room as thick as sheepshearing and made arabesques in the harsh slanting light from the window.
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smell
senses
smoke
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Michael Chabon |
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e1ff17d
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It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like The Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly colored flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly..
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Michael Chabon |
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484ec97
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you could blow on a fire to stoke it, but if you blew on a little flame, it would go out. He headed up into Woodberry
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Michael Chabon |
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5743d75
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an ancient woman, swarthy and whiskered and crooked like a finger.
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Michael Chabon |
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9055514
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The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist luster to the party.
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Michael Chabon |
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8bf0b87
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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 everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed
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Michael Chabon |
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e9b6efe
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The fathers were standing around in their baseball caps, in a knot, smoking and talking. They looked over at Kohn's van, trying to identify it. Many of them would have known each other all their lives. On this field they would have tormented the chubby, the bespectacled goat of their generation. Their sons sat clumped along the bench like pigeons on the arm of a statue.
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Michael Chabon |
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0057ffe
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Kohn had played on an intramural team in college. He had been the second-worst player on a team that finished in ninth place out of twelve. Bengt looked a little surprised. "What position?" "Outfield." Kohn had a sudden craving for the broad skewed vista from far right, the distant buzz of chatter from the bench, the outfielder's blank bovine consciousness of grass and sky. If you backed up far enough out there on a hot summer day you cou..
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Michael Chabon |
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38766de
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He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs.
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Michael Chabon |
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89e6c5d
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Wow,' said Eddie. Oriole had revealed the secret of her necklace to him many times in the past, in exactly these terms, following the script of the tour she conducted for visitors through a fragmentary scale model of her vanished life.
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Michael Chabon |
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a3d3e76
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The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something--one poor, dumb, powerful thing--exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escap..
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Michael Chabon |
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b1f013f
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You know I have no patience with nonsense," said the Northeast's leading wholesaler of chattering windup mandibles."
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Michael Chabon |
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f289fd4
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Over the years, a number of judges, among them the great Learned Hand, had attempted, tongues not always quite firmly in cheek, to sort out these fine and crucial distinctions. A legal definition of the term "superhero" had even been arrived at."
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Michael Chabon |
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1a84eb8
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The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa's idea of fostering a sense of connection between father and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective. "That's unusual," Sammy"
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Michael Chabon |
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2d5da46
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He ordered a slice of the house's excellent Sacher torte and a cup of coffee that was unusually drinkable for New York, and waited.
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Michael Chabon |
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5d53c06
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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 everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly ..
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Michael Chabon |
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d68ca84
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It was just an old clock, your honor," he told Smith, looking at once relieved and disappointed. "In the desk of a Mister ... Clay. Taped to a couple of dowels painted red." "I knew it," said Joe softly, starting in on the second little box. "Dynamite isn't even red," the old fireman said, walking off. "Not really." "The guy reads too much comic books," Joe said."
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Michael Chabon |
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0ebf7f9
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She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work.
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Michael Chabon |
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1fba120
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As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them."
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Michael Chabon |
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c3e074e
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Kun katson nyt Challengerin miehiston kuvaa, en nae seitsemaa hymyilijaa, kaunista Judy Resnickia enka oikeastaan edes pienoismallia sinansa. Naen vain piilotetut rakastavaiset, joiden kohtalot ovat kietoutuneet toisiinsa kuin heidan vartalonsa ja jotka odottavat kiihkeasti vapautuvansa painovoimasta, joka on aina pitanyt heidat maassa.
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challenger
painovoima
pienoismallit
rakastavaiset
rakkaus
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Michael Chabon |
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0231f3b
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it was not a confidence in his own abilities that seemed to direct Tracy Bacon so much as an assuredness of being welcome wherever he went. He was golden and beautiful,
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Michael Chabon |
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314765e
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One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.
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Michael Chabon |
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f115401
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If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one.
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Michael Chabon |
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cca7fa8
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I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field...
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Michael Chabon |
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13e4156
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A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while.
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Michael Chabon |
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2e80bc0
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I feel great," I said, trying to decide how I did feel.
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Michael Chabon |
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b1df4d2
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as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd.
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Michael Chabon |
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50725f3
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Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture.
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Michael Chabon |
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dc75d20
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Are you mocking the concept?""Not necessary," Berko says. "The concept mocks itself."
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Michael Chabon |
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9442288
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Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.
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Michael Chabon |
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faffe5f
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Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself
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Michael Chabon |