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3829107
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An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left with its engine running in the middle of his brain.
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Michael Chabon |
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237c486
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Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, "In everything but sexual preference."
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Michael Chabon |
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10593e8
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He was through with this conversation. 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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marriage
conversation
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Michael Chabon |
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65099b4
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I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That's another way of saying it was all I had.
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Michael Chabon |
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ac407a4
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It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.
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Michael Chabon |
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dbe41a1
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He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little. When Tommy was still an unknown fishboy inside Rosa, Sammy had resolved never to let him feel abandoned, never to walk out on him, and until now, until tonight, he had managed to keep the promise, though there were times--the night he had decided to take that job at Gold Star Comics, for example--when it had been difficult. But the truth was th..
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Michael Chabon |
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ca42c92
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Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases to..
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Michael Chabon |
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d07bdf1
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Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took-but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or h..
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Michael Chabon |
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fe4909e
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Entertainment has a bad name...The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights.
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Michael Chabon |
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cda9193
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I don't want to have 'carnal knowledge' with any old Zuni, asshole." From the way she seemed to relish the word asshole as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, and I was momentarily very jealous of Arthur. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too."
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Michael Chabon |
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df3776a
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People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh." [ ]"
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reading
books
modern-society
modern-life
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Michael Chabon |
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d19d6fe
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He addressed the class...in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock.
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Michael Chabon |
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fc5f302
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Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance.
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Michael Chabon |
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eb751b6
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He took a step toward her, than another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities and ten thousand darkened rooms. He was going to ask her to dance - that was all.
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Michael Chabon |
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4312715
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A gin and tonic under its tiny canopy of lime, I said, elevates character and makes for enlightened conversation
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Michael Chabon |
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e82311b
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Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake.
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Michael Chabon |
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66e6d25
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I don't save lives," Zelikman said. "I just prolong their futility."
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Michael Chabon |
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170f75f
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The lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people.
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Michael Chabon |
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f40b689
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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 series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all.
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death-and-dying
fathers
fatherhood
father
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Michael Chabon |
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6fb5129
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The shaping of a golem, to [Joe] 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 Es..
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Michael Chabon |
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e9b0478
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They weren't my family and it wasn't my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get.
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Michael Chabon |
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4ff50b3
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Rosa's brush caught the rime of ash on his lapel, the missed button of his waistcoat, the tender, impatient, defiant expression in his eyes by means of which he is clearly trying to convey to the artist, telepathically, that he intends, in an hour or so, to f*ck her.
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Michael Chabon |
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a5c2b79
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it had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered--what matters so often in the course of everyday human life--were the surfaces and the joins.
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Michael Chabon |
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e0e9ac2
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The brake and gas were rigged to suit a man of his stature, and he handled them like Horowitz sailing through a storm of Liszt.
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Michael Chabon |
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74491a6
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But Josef, like many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ.
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Michael Chabon |
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6563cb5
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There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and cooly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. The locker room became a place of torment, full of exposed male genitalia that seemed to taunt me with my failure to avoid glancing at them, for a fraction of a seco..
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humor
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Michael Chabon |
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650691c
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She had been an exhausting woman to love. But he had loved her no less passionately for the hard work.
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Michael Chabon |
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f587f87
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The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.
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Michael Chabon |
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18927ab
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They had an old-fashioned sincerity...that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesised in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collective of blind ex-Carmelite Wiccans.
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Michael Chabon |
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1d0e07e
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Yet entertainment--as I define it, pleasure and all--remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the univ..
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writing
entertainment
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Michael Chabon |
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675a82f
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He nodded then cocked his head and gave me a sharp, policeman like look, as though realizing that he had been on the wrong page with me all along. I fell under the heading of Dealing with Assholes.
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Michael Chabon |
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80d8db8
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He could not shake the feeling - reportedly common among ghosts - that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.
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Michael Chabon |
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d4df1b6
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One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Con..
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Michael Chabon |
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82f904c
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The confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.
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Michael Chabon |
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71705d0
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I like the way she dances. She shows a heavy Pharaonic influence, I'd say, in the elbows. With perhaps just a soupcon of Snoopy in the feet.
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Michael Chabon |
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924c914
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But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read SWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORA SUITS (3)-HORA ASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORA Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with..
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penmanship
holocaust
father
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Michael Chabon |
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e97d7bd
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I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it.
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magic
trust
humor
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Michael Chabon |
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d660ea1
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Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I'm not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir. There was something in Mendele. There was a fire.
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philosophy
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Michael Chabon |
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9dd9d3d
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Crabtree's father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. 'She can make you anything,' went a favorite line of his. 'She made me a queer.' He had been lost to the clutch of Satan since early adolescence and hadn't seen them in years.
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Michael Chabon |
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b10fd88
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Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but nobody wanted to hear that America's ascent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.
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Michael Chabon |
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3f5a985
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His bit of pencil turned up in the seat pocket of his short trousers, but as the search for the pad continued without issue a crease appeared in the boy's domed brow. He patted himself up and down until filaments of honey floss formed between his fingertips and pockets, coating him in a gossamer down. The old man watched helpless as the boy, with mounting agitation, spun threads of loss from his palms and fingertips.
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Michael Chabon |
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220dcfa
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The fundamental purpose of storytelling is to pass the time, which is infinite, slow, and weighs heavy in our hands. When the first storyteller, having told the first story, fell silent, somebody sitting there by the fire said, "Then what happened?" and the Age of Sequels began." --
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Michael Chabon |
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d0d98e8
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He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe's, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushboys with their rustling racks of furs and trousers. There were sailors and prizefighters; there were bums, sad and menacing, and ladies in piped jackets with dogs in their handbags. Tommy would feel the sidewalks hum and shudder as the trains ro..
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Michael Chabon |
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e06af7c
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Of all the tricks played by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life. Endings are as imaginary as the equator or the poles. They draw a line, mark a point, that is present nowhere in the creation they purport to reflect an..
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Michael Chabon |