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14a77be
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Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.
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Michael Chabon |
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04097e5
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Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time.
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Michael Chabon |
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6f6692e
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The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.
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Michael Chabon |
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c521364
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He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was.
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Michael Chabon |
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45e3bc1
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Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him
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Michael Chabon |
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aa982ad
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When he walked outside again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts.
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Michael Chabon |
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4a8e991
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With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.
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Michael Chabon |
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755d2ce
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I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction.
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Michael Chabon |
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da08e44
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Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.
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tendrils
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Michael Chabon |
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d5e6ce3
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The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.
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Michael Chabon |
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539c004
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A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county ..
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travel
freedom
life
wandering
repression
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Michael Chabon |
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da52c92
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Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing down with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.
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Michael Chabon |
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27fda26
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I can imagine anything except having no imagination.
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Michael Chabon |
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d0d26d0
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The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass to 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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3baf6d1
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She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.
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Michael Chabon |
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02bd896
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Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?
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Michael Chabon |
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a63dc7a
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The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.
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Michael Chabon |
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a679d3e
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Childhood is a branch of cartography.
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Michael Chabon |
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75c452d
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You would never do anything like that, would you?" my wife asked him. "You would never hurt animals." Our son shook his head, looking offended by the question. He might have been lying, but my knowledge of his belief system, composed of equal parts off-kilter Far Side animal-centrism and a dark Captain Nemoesque contempt for humanity, inclined me to think he was telling the truth. Gigantic fish pulling the limbs from cruel little boys, that..
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humor
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Michael Chabon |
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d1022c2
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And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.
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Michael Chabon |
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6088fec
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Eight solid light-years of lead...is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.
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Michael Chabon |
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9a4575a
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A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I'd never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair.
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slow-dancing
waiting-for-the-bus
sweat
high-school
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Michael Chabon |
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5e9019a
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Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather's wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother's question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.
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Michael Chabon |
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4f79ab1
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It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.
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woman
sour
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Michael Chabon |
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15a18a0
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Success, however, does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do.
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Michael Chabon |
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a83a14e
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The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings--the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted--had he not?--by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their br..
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Michael Chabon |
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c63516c
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The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for your..
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mortality
death
religion
soul
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Michael Chabon |
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cf71218
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Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.
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Michael Chabon |
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6610044
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You have to look at Jews like Bina Gelbfish, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the district of Sitka. Methodological, organised, p..
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judaism
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Michael Chabon |
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bb099cd
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See you in the funny papers," he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation."
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Michael Chabon |
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ba7ab77
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It holds my essential stuff, including a book--for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one's pocket[...]
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Michael Chabon |
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18c27b7
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It really is a shame that through our sad neglect of wonders, hopefulness, and trust we allowed so much clutter and debris to build up in the space that once connected us to Diamond Green.
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Michael Chabon |
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ceb6977
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The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.
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Michael Chabon |
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70e9748
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I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing "Barefootin'," of the downy slope of her neck and the declivity in her nightgown as she bent to wash her face in the bathroom sink, of a tuna salad sandwich she'd handed me one windy afternoon as we sat at a picnic table in Lucia, California, and looked out for the passage of whales, ..
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Michael Chabon |
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167f5fa
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Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It's the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he had long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longho..
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Michael Chabon |
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c209071
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I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.
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Michael Chabon |
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36cbd36
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The April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the luster of his existence - the moment when, for the first time in his life, he was fully conscious of his own happiness - was a night that he would never discuss with anyone at all.
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Michael Chabon |
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4a67fb8
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You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus.
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Michael Chabon |
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050228d
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Do what you gotta do and stay fly
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Michael Chabon |
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fe917fa
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Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.
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religion
miracles
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Michael Chabon |
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7e1b7f0
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The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all it's analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.
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war
humanity
rocket
wwi
space
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Michael Chabon |
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8c0d556
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I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, even during the long period when I was cooking under my mother's supervision and with the benefit of her experience. I still fail all the time, in particular when I turn to baking. After hundreds of attempts, following dozens of different formulas, I don't think I have ever made what I would consider to be a completely successful pie crust. Disaster is somehow part of the appeal of cooking for me. If..
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Michael Chabon |
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936e898
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Meeting a namesake is one of the most delicate and most brief surprises.
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Michael Chabon |
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0ed3a7e
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The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research "childhood." There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and..
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Michael Chabon |