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0af1e94
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Grainger looked exasperated. "Why don't you just come straight out and use the word ? "Because the aliens here."
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Michel Faber |
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8110d84
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We are all specialised forms of survivor. We lack what we fundamentally need and forge ahead regardless, hurriedly hiding our wounds, disguising our ineptitude, bluffing our way through our weaknesses.
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Michel Faber |
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c71570d
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Can't you see that? Everybody's sentimental, everybody.
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Michel Faber |
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88d8dc4
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Few know what year it is, or even that eighteen and a half centuries are supposed to have passed since a Jewish troublemaker was hauled away to the gallows for disturbing the peace
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Michel Faber |
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e937738
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It was such an infantile prayer, the sort of prayer a five-year-old might pray. But maybe those were the best kind.
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Michel Faber |
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362acbc
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I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.
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Michel Faber |
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54a71cc
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Why was even the shallowest human conversation so fraught with pitfalls and tricky calibrations? Why couldn't people just keep silent until they had something essential to say, like the Oasans?
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Michel Faber |
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7305077
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He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land .....
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Michel Faber |
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9e3ebb1
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He only wished he'd had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn't a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one's energy--insignificant in itself--to the vastly greater energy that was God's love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body.
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Michel Faber |
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e3d7053
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People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above.
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globe
infinities
people
space
surface
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Michel Faber |
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57630f4
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Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.
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Michel Faber |
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adbdc7e
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MERCY. It was a word she'd rarely encountered
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Michel Faber |
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55a8fec
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Not for the first time, Peter thought about how much of our lives we spend sequestered inside small patches of electric brightness, blind to everything beyond the reach of those fragile bulbs.
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bulbs
electric
fragile
lives
sequestered
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Michel Faber |
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fdc9a76
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Forgive me, Lord, for the smallness and selfishness of my mind. Amen.
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Michel Faber |
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da02574
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All along the street, keys rattle in key-holes as each shop's ornate metal clothing is stripped away...It's as if, having unlocked the chastity of shutters and doors, they can't see the point in maintaining any shred of modesty.
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Michel Faber |
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2f38ab7
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You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.
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greed
paradise
war
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Michel Faber |
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59eacb2
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Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of bedroom, they vanish the moment they're over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: is a nakedness which can never be clothed again
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photography
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Michel Faber |
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97e396e
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if she were its leader. Not that she ever would be: she was born to be a dissenter within a larger certainty, she knows that.
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Michel Faber |
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f0500dd
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You one of those decaffeinated Christians, ? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last judgement, 100% less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?
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christians
jew
judgement
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Michel Faber |
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a353ab9
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There was a red button on the wall labeled EMERGENCY, but no button labeled BEWILDERMENT.
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Michel Faber |
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1f9ccb6
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Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow's evaporation, When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever.
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Michel Faber |
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5e1d541
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Anyway," Peter continued. "I got the most welcome. These people are desperate to learn about God!" "Well, ain't that a lick on the dick," said BG."
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lick-on-the-dick
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Michel Faber |
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e8d412a
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it was already tomorrow. She should have known from the beginning that it would end like this.
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Michel Faber |
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78786a1
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ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.
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Michel Faber |
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9bf3fad
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Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already
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Michel Faber |
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55d4b3e
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Some people go through heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? An then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old..
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Michel Faber |
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0b01f3f
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A simple fuck is one thing, but let a man sleep with you just once and he thinks he can bring his dog and his pigeons.
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Michel Faber |
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ef53989
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I wouldn't use the word 'man'. The Hebrew is , which I would argue encompasses both sexes.
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hebrew
man
sexes
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Michel Faber |
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2e94333
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Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas
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Michel Faber |
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02b7213
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She sings on and on, while the house is discreetly dusted all around her and, in the concealed and subterranean kitchen, a naked duck, limp and faintly steaming, spreads its pimpled legs on a draining board.
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Michel Faber |
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be8a05f
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The holy book he'd spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren't religious.
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Michel Faber |
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5bc7d3d
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What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.
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apathy
existence
existentialism
futility
habit
hopeless
hopelessness
time
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Michel Faber |
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837ebd2
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Belief was a place that people didn't leave until they absolutely must.
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Michel Faber |
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5967f8e
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God, Agnes has decided, is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach. So, They tolerate each other, and take care of the world as best They can. Moving
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Michel Faber |
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9b6d0e4
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Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude.
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Michel Faber |
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e071529
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William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one's servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it's not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham's household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity.
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Michel Faber |
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c012057
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Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours
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Michel Faber |
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b8094b4
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So much for yesterday. Today, Sophie's formal education must begin. Dressing the lamb before the kill, as Mrs Castaway once put it, when Sugar dared to ask what, exactly, education is.
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Michel Faber |
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66f270a
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Never too late for vocabulary building," he said."
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Michel Faber |
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bcce94b
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reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude. Of
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Michel Faber |
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5bec4b0
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The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the
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Michel Faber |
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458fd67
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Hey, ! There is a way out. Come to beautiful Oasis. No crime, no madness, no bad stuff of any kind, a brand new home, home on the range, no or antelope but hey, accentuate the positive, there never is a discouraging word, nobody rapes you or tries to reminisce about Paris in the springtime, no sense sniffing that old vomit, right? Cut the strings, blank the slate, let go of Auschwitz and the Alamo and the ... the fucking for God's sake, ..
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auschwitz
oasis
paradise
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Michel Faber |
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7b17d96
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Peter's hands had ceased trembling. He had been granted perspective. This was not Gethsemane: he wasn't headed for Golgotha, he was embarking on a great adventure. He'd been chosen out of thousands, to pursue the most important missionary calling since the Apostles had ventured forth to conquer Rome with the power of love, and he was going to do his best.
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Michel Faber |
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6dbf3a8
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oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence.
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Michel Faber |