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163f914
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Gibson Goode to Archy: "You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin."
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Michael Chabon |
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7b38266
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The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, ..
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Michael Chabon |
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263254f
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A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.
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smile
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Michael Chabon |
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0ce17a9
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You read my Cosmo?" "I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions." "How did I do?" "You cheated," I said."
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cosmo
quiz
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Michael Chabon |
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912b2f9
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He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.
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Michael Chabon |
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d241921
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Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it."
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Michael Chabon |
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6327b60
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he lifted his eyes. The eternal kind went out of his shoulder. He opened his mouth and closed it again, speechless with outrage, joy, and wonder. Then he burst into tears.
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Michael Chabon |
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906b2c1
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And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said.
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Michael Chabon |
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baa0c82
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Valetta," he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer's smell of love candles and sandlewood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado...
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Michael Chabon |
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629b15c
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You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you, and if you are lucky they even on occasion manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enough. Abe had not been dressing up, styling himself, for all these years because he was trying to prove how different he was from everyone else. He did it in the hope of attracting the attention of somebody else--somewhere, someday--who ..
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finding-your-people
tribes
fatherhood
parenting
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Michael Chabon |
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fbeb4f0
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it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.
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Michael Chabon |
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22878a7
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Always true to the code," she said."
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Michael Chabon |
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9fda608
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Vulgar language," Chan said..."Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say."
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Michael Chabon |
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b818776
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Through a determined program of sheer dumb luck and liberal applications of THC I had managed never to impregnate a woman before,
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Michael Chabon |
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deb98a7
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Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool.
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Michael Chabon |
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76b96ae
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Archy was tired of Nat, and he was tired of Gwen and of her pregnancy with all the unsuspected depths of his insufficiency that it threatened to reveal. He was tired of Brokeland, and of black people, and of white people, and of all their schemes and grudges, their frontings, hustles and corruptions. 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 atoll in the path of..
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Michael Chabon |
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ea98f4c
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Huh-uh," Archy said, not trying to charm or work her anymore, the deep 1978 El Cerrito-apartment sullenness starting to seep out of him as he remembered how Luther and Valletta used to leave him there all night by himself, nothing on the television but Wolfman Jack and some movie where a shark-toothed devil doll was biting Karen Black on the ankles."
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Michael Chabon |
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7385951
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Fatherhood impose[s] an obligation that [is] more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.
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Michael Chabon |
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804936e
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But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.
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Michael Chabon |
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47c2776
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Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a
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Michael Chabon |
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c95ebc2
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Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker.
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Michael Chabon |
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2336075
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Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
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Michael Chabon |
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d2ce21b
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He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.
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Michael Chabon |
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05a0422
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Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth. I
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Michael Chabon |
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56d0650
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Over the years I'd surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions.
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Michael Chabon |
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626dab0
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The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.
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sex
love
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Michael Chabon |
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56ef987
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because it was a drunken perception, it was perfect, entire, and lasted about half a second. I
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Michael Chabon |
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a63f8c0
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Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He
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Michael Chabon |
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b7cd50c
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I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds.
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Michael Chabon |
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ffeecc1
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She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves.
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Michael Chabon |
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c110b8a
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I DRANK FOR YEARS, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. 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.
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Michael Chabon |
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454d16d
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It was at these times that he began to understand, after all those years of study and performance, of feats and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scettered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But every..
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Michael Chabon |
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41b7945
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From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow! capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, star!ing out the casement window. Not ..
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Michael Chabon |
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afddd05
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It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls.
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Michael Chabon |
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b4955e0
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writers--like insomniacs--are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.
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Michael Chabon |
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b6c7245
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Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that their loving each other had seemed to put at so much risk--his career in comic books, his relations with his family, his place in the world--as the walls of a prison, an airless, lightless keep from which there was no hope of escape. Sammy had long since ceased to value the security that he had once been so reluctant to imperil.
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Michael Chabon |
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de9df91
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We figure he must have let him out. The perpetrator, I mean. He's blind and we figure he just wandered off and maybe got run over." "The perpetrator." "No, the dog."
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Michael Chabon |
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281eeef
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Although in the past I had seen a few exchanges of genuine affection between them, the Warshaw men were awkward and ill at ease with each other.
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Michael Chabon |
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d1636ac
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My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.
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Michael Chabon |
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a7c4eb2
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He had yet to fall in love to the degree that he felt he was capable of falling, had never written villanelles or declaration veiled in careful metaphor, nor sold his blood plasma to buy champagne or jonquils, nor haunted a mailbox or a phone booth or a certain cafe, nor screamed his beloved's name in the streets at three in the morning, heedless of the neighbors.
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Michael Chabon |
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6a7ca32
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There is no more useless activity than that of periodization, the packaging of history, in particular cultural history, into discrete eras--the Jazz Age, the Greatest Generation, the Eisenhower years, the Sixties. Such periods can never be honestly articulated without recourse to so many demurrals and arbitrary demarcations, and the granting of so many exceptions, as to render them practically useless for any kind of serious historical purp..
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Michael Chabon |
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489a42a
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What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever."
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Michael Chabon |
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e2221fc
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The shock and fragrance of life, steaming red life, given off by the trail of the German's blood in the snow was a reproach to Joe, the reproach of something beautiful and inestimable, like innocence, which he had been lured by the Ice into betraying. In seeking revenge, he had allied himself with the Ice, with the interminable white topography, with the sawteeth and crevasses of death. Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shootin..
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Michael Chabon |
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56be624
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He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much--indeed to revolve around him--could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all.
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Michael Chabon |