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7491569
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The day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody's asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?
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snark
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Michael Chabon |
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8fcc01d
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The evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature.
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Michael Chabon |
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32220b4
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A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.
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insightful
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Michael Chabon |
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5539390
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Sitting on Rosa's moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat.
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Michael Chabon |
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6e00fbd
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And in that moment he felt- for the first time that optimistic and cheerful boy allowed himself to feel- how badly made life was, how flawed. No matter how richly furnished you made it, with all the noise and variet of Something, Nothing always found a way in, seeped through the cracks and patches. 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 almo..
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Michael Chabon |
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afa6b9b
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She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned.
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Michael Chabon |
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d6db9f4
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Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick's face...The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of ..
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Michael Chabon |
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d057ffe
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A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.
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Michael Chabon |
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55ea9b9
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I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even, for a week, as the Mackinac Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far.
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Michael Chabon |
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7dcf01c
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it was the insoluble problems--the false leads and the cold cases--that reflected the true nature of things.
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Michael Chabon |
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67cd28f
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It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.
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Michael Chabon |
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e081e39
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I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.
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youth
human-nature
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Michael Chabon |
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c02575a
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As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.
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Michael Chabon |
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30e2a8b
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I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That's what they tell you to do. But when you're old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn't finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn't last or fought with all your heart to ge..
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shame
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Michael Chabon |
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0c37669
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She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose. She was quixotically vain about her appearance and spent an hour each morning making up her ..
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Michael Chabon |
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47e5bec
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Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.
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fiction
writing
movies
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Michael Chabon |
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84f1673
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It was the pleasure that a liar takes in his lie as it enters the world wearing the accent and raiment of the truth, sounding so right and plausible that--if he is any kind of liar at all--he begins, himself, to believe it. It was the pleasure that a maker of golems takes as the force of his words, the rhythm and accuracy of his alphabetical spells, blow life into the cold clay nostrils, and the great stony hand unclenches and reaches for h..
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Michael Chabon |
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4234ccc
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The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million places where life lives and things happen and creatures come and go.
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Michael Chabon |
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a5697d0
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The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward
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Michael Chabon |
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069bfaf
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He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman's lack of faith.
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Michael Chabon |
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50df592
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Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away. Landsman looks away.
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Michael Chabon |
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225ee8f
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But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given.
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Michael Chabon |
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3f30ba6
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Every hour that passes, another hundredweight of sand is poured in through a tiny hole in Landsman's soul. After his eyes are closed, what happens is never quite sleep, and the thoughts that plague him, though atrocious, are never quite dreams.
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Michael Chabon |
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e25f8d8
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This was the writer's true doppelganger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work -- Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver -- whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life's very course.
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Michael Chabon |
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4687293
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Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail.
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Michael Chabon |
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1e9589b
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Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it -- there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery -- but this was, a..
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art
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Michael Chabon |
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5f7c8f2
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A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife's lover, this you consider to be unlikely. A murderous Nazi spy with orders to abduct a parrot, on the other hand--
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Michael Chabon |
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6c2844b
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My dear son, It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with
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Michael Chabon |
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6555b22
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I didn't want to be left alone with Timothy, not because I was afraid of him but because I was afraid that somebody would come into the office and see us sitting there, two matching rejects in matching orange chairs.
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Michael Chabon |
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b31a452
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He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.
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Michael Chabon |
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be7bff1
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Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot.
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Michael Chabon |
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442b992
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For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.
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Michael Chabon |
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485b792
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A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding.
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Michael Chabon |
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61f2f23
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My story and my stories are all, in one or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat.
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Michael Chabon |
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2a41c7c
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And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found crumbs of dried blood in her hair. It was a purely impersonal hunger, if such a thing there was - and here her report to Mr. Panicker faltered under the burden of his disapproval for her "romantic nature" - a hunger devoid of prurience, appeti..
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old
sherlock-holmes
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Michael Chabon |
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cd649a2
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If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it's too late!
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Michael Chabon |
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f8fe193
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I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon," said the kid, gravely mistaken."
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Michael Chabon |
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0c19c49
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It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.
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Michael Chabon |
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d11a619
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All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption.
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violence
war
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Michael Chabon |
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993a1eb
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Sammy felt...that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.
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Michael Chabon |
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a1c0b0c
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His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.
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luck
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Michael Chabon |
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1f500fd
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She reaches down into her bulging tote bag and pulls out a small plastic box with a hinged lid. It contains a round pill box with a threaded lid from which she tips out a vitamin pill, a fish-oil pill, and the enzyme tablet that lets her stomach digest milk. Inside the hinged plastic box she also carries packets of salt, pepper, horseradish, and hand-wipes, a doll size bottle of Tabasco sauce, chlorine pills for treating drinking water, Pep..
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humor
lists
purses
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Michael Chabon |
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44722ab
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Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge - not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there - he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, but his shifting was smooth and the sturdy little car was adroit at changing lanes. He launched himself out over the East River. He could feel the bridge humming underneath his wheels and all around him could sense the engineering of it, the for..
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Michael Chabon |
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43dfefd
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Shprintzl Rudashevsky's wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she's wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth.
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Michael Chabon |