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73e7b41
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I had slipped into that familiar marijuana state which lies between happiness and utter panic, and my heart was pounding.
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Michael Chabon |
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a7cf0bf
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When the two of us were at last free and clear of our past entanglements, social and professional, Sara and I were married here, at the Town Hall, by a justice of the peace who was a distant cousin of my grandmother,
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Michael Chabon |
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21ca645
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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
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Michael Chabon |
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4d1df48
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In order to destroy the world, it becomes necessary to save it.
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Michael Chabon |
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d07d3b3
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Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.
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Michael Chabon |
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e1990b2
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all I want to do is get home and never see any of you authors ever again,
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Michael Chabon |
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45b753d
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The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.
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Michael Chabon |
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489e991
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Tommy had never been successful at explaining himself to adults because of their calamitous heedlessness,
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Michael Chabon |
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bd9e781
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THE STORY GOES THAT I sucked too avidly at my mother's breast, and caused an abscess to bloom in the tender flesh of her left nipple. My grandmother, less kind in those days than afterward, disapproved strongly when at seventeen my mother had married, and managed to instill her daughter with a powerful sense of ill-equipment for the task of mothering me; the failure of her breast to bear up to the ardor of my infant lips filled my mother wi..
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Michael Chabon |
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a26ee3f
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The foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself that you could fly.
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Michael Chabon |
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40ccad6
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acromegaly. Frau Dr. Anna Kavalier was a neurologist
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Michael Chabon |
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6d9049f
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stories make life so much better.
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Michael Chabon |
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f0547af
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a momentary gain in one's own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared rapture, shared loneliness, shared broken-hearted glee;
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Michael Chabon |
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cd9dcaf
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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 passing. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World's Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark o..
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Michael Chabon |
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6c08dc8
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In my experience, Detective, it's all middle game.
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Michael Chabon |
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a784175
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War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs.
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Michael Chabon |
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e51a2bb
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I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I'm not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern.
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Michael Chabon |
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99acb8e
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But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives.
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Michael Chabon |
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73f4cff
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there was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick.
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Michael Chabon |
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63e3f3a
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But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives. She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought not to want to.
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Michael Chabon |
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27b8271
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The handsome Vintage Internationals edition of Nabokov's Ada, or, Ardor--an extended riff on alternate-world and time theories and a key early example in the retro-futuristic subgenre of science fiction that years later came to be known as steampunk--would look out of place in the science-fiction section, with the blue-foil lettering, the starships, the furry-faced aliens, the electron-starred vistas of cyberspace.
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Michael Chabon |
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211b6c2
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To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her.
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Michael Chabon |
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4c3b943
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selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough's three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a parting in the curtains.
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Michael Chabon |
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97866ca
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The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes.
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Michael Chabon |
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b5c3be5
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He told himself he would move faster and smarter alone, but the truth was that he was grieving for Aughenbaugh, 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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6eefe4e
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The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began, whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled."
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Michael Chabon |
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e87ad2c
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A few flames crackled here and there along the nubs that once were branches. Then they flickered out, too, leaving smoke, a whistle of steam, and a light snowfall of ashes.
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Michael Chabon |
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13ba21a
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You can write great books," the great man continued. "Or you can have kids. It's up to you." [...] Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became, and the more books you produced. Excellence plus productivity, that was the formula for sustained success, and time was the coefficient of both. Children, the great man said, were notorious thieves of time. [...] Writers need to be irresponsible, ultimately, to everyt..
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writing-life
writing
parenting
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Michael Chabon |
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f0852a4
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that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving.
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Michael Chabon |
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fdca95b
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I smiled. I supposed she was exhibiting what people nowadays refer to, with crushing disapproval, as denial. It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.
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Michael Chabon |
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285d848
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they had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.
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Michael Chabon |
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6baa401
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Sammy felt, that morning, with his ribs bruised and a wan flavor of chlorine at the back of his mouth, that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving.
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Michael Chabon |
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f688a0c
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They're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.
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Michael Chabon |
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51e82e7
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The local drunks - there must have been about sixty-five or seventy of them, many related by blood or sexual history - were a close-knit population involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the building over several generations, of a basilica of failure, on whose overcrowded friezes they figured in vivid depictions of bankruptcy, drug rehabilitation, softball and arrest. There was no role in this communal endeavor for the summer islande..
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Michael Chabon |
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e68aef3
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At least he kept trying to express himself, his real self, as motley and inchoate for now as the outfit he was wearing. And maybe that was part of the purpose of middle school: to give you something to work against, to press upon, as you attempted to fashion a self from the lump of contradictory impulses and emotions and paradigms that your mind and your culture presented.
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parenting
teenagers
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Michael Chabon |
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a3b66b0
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The odd agglomeration of Warshaws, the product of a long and determined program of overseas adoptions, with its combination of Jews and Koreans, intellectuals, space cadets, and sharpies, no two of them related by blood, seemed to offer me the best chance yet to wire my wandering meteor to the armillary sphere of a family.
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Michael Chabon |
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5bf7831
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You can't walk me to school," Tommy said. He came into the kitchen, sat down before his plate, and stared at it, waiting for Sammy to pile it with eggs. "Mom, you can't possibly. I would die. I would absolutely die." "He would die," Sammy told Rosa. "Which would be very embarrassing for me," Rosa said. "Standing there next to a dead body in front of William Floyd Junior High."
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humor
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Michael Chabon |
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35f9d7b
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Having lost his mother, father, brother, and 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 easy 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 handcuffs and shackles, from countr..
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Michael Chabon |
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8d45f9f
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Sammy started to pull the covers up over him. Then he stopped and just stood there looking at Tommy, loving him, and feeling the usual spasm of shame that it should be while he was watching the boy sleep that he felt most like a father, or rather, the happiest to be one.
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Michael Chabon |
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819547d
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It was awful luck that my pot-hobbled spermatozoa had managed to rally themselves for one last mad fallopian adventure, and that five years' worth of love, good companionship, and the exhilaration of sneaking around should come in the end to a referendum on my fitness as a father, but there it was.
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Michael Chabon |
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8324043
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male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.
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Michael Chabon |
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c042b99
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It reassured me that, if nothing else in life, at least I'd fulfilled my earliest ambition simply to wander far afield, in spirit if not in space, from the place of my birth.
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Michael Chabon |
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adb9137
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And there were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworks and the Bessemer converter of love.
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Michael Chabon |
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bc5c391
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We're just animals in a cage. They're just feeding us to keep us alive.
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Michael Chabon |