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50cd85f
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hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.
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Michael Chabon |
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e6694c1
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There's something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. I don't mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated. I stopped drinking not because I had a drinking problem, although I suppose I may..
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Michael Chabon |
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8571b3e
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They were utopian, which meant they saw imperfection everywhere they looked.
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Michael Chabon |
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deed30d
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On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in ..
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Michael Chabon |
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a31e562
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An excess of the desire to appear grown up is one of the defining characteristics of adolescence.
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Michael Chabon |
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25b9ec0
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But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.
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marriage
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Michael Chabon |
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369c6c3
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She can't go in there," he says firmly. "It isn't appropriate." "See this, sweetness?" Bina has fished out her badge. "I'm like a cash gift. I'm always appropriate."
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Michael Chabon |
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6466162
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And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within itself.
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Michael Chabon |
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578bf05
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It's the kind of house you'd like to wake up in on Christmas morning.
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Michael Chabon |
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07972e7
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She nods, not meeting his gaze, and steps out into the evening. It is raining, of course. The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home.
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Michael Chabon |
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7ee6d03
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It was not an inordinately large ass, yet the heft of it seemed to connect him to an immense source of gravitation, one for which he was belatedly grateful, as though for a long time he had been weightless and drifting.
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Michael Chabon |
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d385a7c
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He could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
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Michael Chabon |
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b4037fc
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You mendacious sons of bitches," the mahout said"
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Michael Chabon |
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ed4391e
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Praise means so much when it comes from a lunatic
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Michael Chabon |
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4291881
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I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writing, and the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day. But most of the time I was just plain dying to get out. All I needed--all I have ever needed--was someone to challenge me, to serve as a goad, an instigator, a stirrer of the pot...
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reading
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Michael Chabon |
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4725c88
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In children's drawings, all houses have chimneys, all monkeys eat bananas, and every rocket is a V-2. Even after decades of stepped-back multistage behemoths, chunky orbiters, and space planes, the midcentury-modern Enterprise, the polyhedral bulk of Imperial star destroyers and Borg cubes, the Ortho-Cyclen disk of Millennium Falcon - in our deepest imaginations the surest way to the nearest planet remains a trim cigar tapering to a pointed..
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rockets
v-2
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Michael Chabon |
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7344765
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My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone's head, he figured; in my grandmother's case it..
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strength
moonglow
survival
mental-illness
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Michael Chabon |
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fafb772
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A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction
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Michael Chabon |
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8b9d062
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Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.
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Michael Chabon |
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f3f2b34
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Joe had run away, escaped without a trace, and come here to hide. But now he was ready to come home. The problem was that he didn't know how to do it.
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Michael Chabon |
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de9e4b5
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my grandmother would freak you the fuck out.
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Michael Chabon |
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2b28efe
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But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.
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Michael Chabon |
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95b7120
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WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY? And, lower: HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES Then: PLUS THERE'S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD A fourth man had concluded: AND OF EVERYTHING
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Michael Chabon |
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31e9917
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Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children.
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Michael Chabon |
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7d979ec
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the Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents.
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Michael Chabon |
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5954045
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The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?
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Michael Chabon |
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63ed3cf
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the greater involution and deeper patina of her left tooth in comparison to the right, the skeptical cast
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Michael Chabon |
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12d47af
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breath, pressed an ear against his chest and took the poor fellow's pulse. While he worked, he asked about the
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Michael Chabon |
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0b2339f
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man coming toward him over the ice, watching
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Michael Chabon |
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3c32262
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Life blew in gusts from the hole in the side of the elephant with a rank smell and a comic flatulence.
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Michael Chabon |
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3e9b995
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You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the
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Michael Chabon |
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23e38bd
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Having lost his mother, father, brother, an grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history--his home--the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags and crates, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a ..
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Michael Chabon |
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2d32a95
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I charge you as I was charged. Don't waste your life. Don't allow your body's weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key.
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Michael Chabon |
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41c1751
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Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?
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Michael Chabon |
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e75e945
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He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style.
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Michael Chabon |
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9f1d9ad
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It's a sinking ship," he said. "You ought to be grateful that they just threw you overboard."
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Michael Chabon |
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1cf9148
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For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.
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Michael Chabon |
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7ff91af
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But he had come here today to stand one final time at the top of one particular signal bridge that he had come to think of as his own, and tell another summer goodbye.
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Michael Chabon |
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ee7d564
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The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash.
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Michael Chabon |
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139f544
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Over the course of that long day in Nordhausen my grandfather gave up the dream he had shared with the Werner von Braun of his imaginings. Along with it a half hour of something that had felt like peace. When those things were gone, there was a bad moment as my grandfather found himself confronted once more with the void that surrounded the planet of his heart.
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Michael Chabon |
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0090915
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He's making an attempt to look at his ease, but some men just don't know how to stand around with their hands in their pockets and look natural.
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Michael Chabon |
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2e935a6
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THE CHOICE, BY BOTH PALESTINIANS AND ISRAELI JEWS, TO TRUST ONE another is perilous. Day after day, the mechanisms of life under occupation succeed in their aim: to disavow the possibility of commonality and coexistence. There
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Michael Chabon |
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a77e333
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Days go by, and I don't remember not to forget..
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MIchael Chabon |
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7d5c4c8
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The candy-colored pavillions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark's fins, golden grilles and honeycombs, the Italian pavillion with its entire facade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit gods, the fountains, the pylons and sundials, the statues of George Washington and Freedom of Speech and Truth Showing the Way to Freedom ha..
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Michael Chabon |