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8b7d001
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I have to keep reminding myself that almost everybody is always lying.
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Michael Cunningham |
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58e5071
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There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
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Michael Cunningham |
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6b86492
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It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her.
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Michael Cunningham |
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78f0782
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Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?
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mystery
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Michael Cunningham |
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127c05c
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Outside the house is a world where the shelves are stocked, where radio waves are full of music, where young men walk the streets again, men who have deprievation and a fear worse than death, who have willingly given up their early twenties and now, thinking of thirty and beyond, haven't any time to spare.
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Michael Cunningham |
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aa2546f
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Tova, koeto poniakoga me trevozheshe, be prostata druzheliubnost na vsichko tova. Zhiveekhme v sviat na dobrota i domashen red. Poniakoga se vizhdakh kato Snezhanka, koiato zhivee pri dzhudzhetata. Dzhudzhetata se grizheli dobre za neia. No kolko d'lgo bi otseliala tia, bez nadezhdata da sreshchne niakoi s neiniia r'st? Kolko li d'lgo e mela i k'rpila, predi da zapochne da razbira, che zhivot't i se s'stoi ot bezopasen rai i ot nevidimi, no..
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Michael Cunningham |
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19e7b46
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who refuses to distinguish between setback and catastrophe; who worships accomplishment above all else and makes himself unbearable to others because he genuinely believes he can root out and reform every incidence of human fecklessness and mediocrity.
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Michael Cunningham |
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b83d428
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It's stores, it's the whole thing, all that shit everywhere, 'scuse me, that merchandise, all those goods, and ads screaming at you from all over the place, buy buy buy buy buy, and when somebody comes up to me with big hair and gobs of makeup on and says, `Can I help you?`, it's all I can do not to scream, `Bitch, you can't even help yourself.
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Michael Cunningham |
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1915204
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Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed.
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Michael Cunningham |
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fd4ec13
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Constantine, eight years old, was working in his father's garden and thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had staked out and combed into rows at the top of his family's land.
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Michael Cunningham |
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f8f0122
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We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, ..
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Michael Cunningham |
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d1e19b2
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I'm just a child who's learned to impersonate an adult.
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Michael Cunningham |
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00cdab5
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There's the appeal of the young thief who robs you, and climbs back down off your cloud. It's possible to love that boy, in a wistful and hopeless way. It's possible to love his greed and narcissism, to grant him that which is beyond your own capacities: heedlessness, cockiness, a self-devotion so pure it borders on the divine.
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Michael Cunningham |
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4d34358
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One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.
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Michael Cunningham |
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bfefdb7
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It's the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you'd expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.
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solitude
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Michael Cunningham |
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78387c0
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Youth is the only sexy tragedy.
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Michael Cunningham |
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06c9cc3
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Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.
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perception
zen
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Michael Cunningham |
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3d790f5
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This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.
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mortality
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Michael Cunningham |
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81247f0
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She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
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ennui
exciting-life
fantasy-life
life-worth-living
regret
resignation
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Michael Cunningham |
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2c831cb
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Zoe loved Trancas's mother. She respected her exhausted and ironic hope for rebirth.
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Michael Cunningham |
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575bede
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Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he's considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him?
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Michael Cunningham |
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60d236b
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Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?
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Michael Cunningham |
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c238cfb
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Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed "interesting" or "promising" but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What's astonishing..
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Michael Cunningham |
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6aeeba0
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Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there's affection and there's sex but there's no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no binding, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily..
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Michael Cunningham |
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57b2d97
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He's filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended.
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Michael Cunningham |
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f295c94
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Peter hesitates. "Ridiculous" is the least of it. How about offensive, insulting? How about the implication that "someone who's never used" is a sad and small figure, standing on the platform, sensibly dressed, as the bus pulls in? Even now, after all those ad campaigns, after all we've learned about how bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that can..
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Michael Cunningham |
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438dae9
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Venture too far for love... and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.
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Michael Cunningham |
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14c5f91
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Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can't.
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Michael Cunningham |
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4d456df
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It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures.
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Michael Cunningham |
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ea408db
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The Taylors have this gift for imperturbable presence. They are not nervous talkers. The Harrises, on the other hand, have always been constant talkers, not so much for the sake of entertainment or information but because if a silence caught and held for too long they might have fallen into a bottomless sullen discord, a frozen mutual quietude that could never be broken because there never had been and never would be a shared topic of suffi..
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Michael Cunningham |
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8dfa732
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Beauty - the beauty Peter craves - is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn't shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he's young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it's something the old tend to forget.
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Michael Cunningham |
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2d890cb
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What did Shakespeare say? Or little lives are rounded with a sleep.
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Michael Cunningham |
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ca90950
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Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book.
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Michael Cunningham |
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6fb8bcf
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Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, three's nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they're good people (mo..
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Michael Cunningham |
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1d35243
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Sometimes the fabric that separates us tears just enough for love to shine through. Sometimes the tear is surprisingly small.
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Michael Cunningham |
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f5e456f
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She'll be willing to meet someone who can hold her interest for more than a few months, and that guy will teach her about domestic deepenings, the modest reliable thrill of the familiar, which as almost everyone but Liz knows has been the way of human happiness since humanity was born.
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love
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Michael Cunningham |
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26f0519
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She doesn't really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder into her eyes, no one marvelling at her.
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Michael Cunningham |
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3f4b549
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And here he is, letting the massive steel street door click shut behind him, standing at the top of the three iron steps that lead down to the shattered sidewalk. New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets potholed and buckling while right over there, around the co..
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Michael Cunningham |
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b521f24
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And so, a never-ending, rather edgy conversation between them, an undercurrent of roiling sound that reminded them they were married, they had two sons, they were living a life, they had preparations to make and disasters to avert and a world to interpret, sign by sign, symbol by symbol, to each other, and that at this point the only fate worse than staying together would be trying, each of them, to live alone.
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Michael Cunningham |
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e2489c0
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Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what's already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though.
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Michael Cunningham |
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b1a8c27
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Beauty is a whore. I prefer money.
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Michael Cunningham |
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105d4e0
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She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
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Michael Cunningham |
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e3ea43b
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They're not tourists, either, they're nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don't live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they're burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they're creatures of the night, they have neighbors whom they consider burghers because they don't like driving in New York, beca..
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Michael Cunningham |
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097d31e
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Clarissa, sane Clarissa-exultant, ordinary Clarissa- will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasure, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.
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Michael Cunningham |