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41b0507
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How's things, man?" The black man extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow. "Very good," said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn't have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day."
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dark-skinned
diversity
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Michel Faber |
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3b301da
|
It's not a colony," another of the USIC interviewers said, with an edge to her voice. "It's a community. We do not use the word colony."
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interviewers
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Michel Faber |
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f89edd0
|
Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.
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Michel Faber |
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beae282
|
The crowds that queued for snacks and knick-knacks, the constant stream of passengers recorded by the closed-circuit TVs, were wondrous proof of the sheer variety of human specimens, except that they were presumed to be identically faithless inside, duty-free in every sense of that word.
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duty-free
faithless
human-specimens
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Michel Faber |
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3b682e2
|
William Rackham es lo que podriamos llamar un cristiano ateo supersticioso; es decir, cree en un Dios que si bien puede que ya no sea responsable de que salga el sol, de salvar a la reina o de proveer del pan de cada dia, sigue siendo el principal sospechoso cuando algo va mal.
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Michel Faber |
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579af12
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was a female. Isserley wasn't interested in females, at least not in that way. Let them get picked up by someone else. If the hitcher was male, she usually went back for another look, unless he was an obvious weakling. Assuming he'd made a reasonable impression on her,
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Michel Faber |
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68c08b0
|
Only the other day, Robbie had gone to a terrible disco in Alness, hoping it would transform his life in some way.
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Michel Faber |
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06600b2
|
But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again.
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Michel Faber |
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5a09e23
|
A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.
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insight
society
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Michel Faber |
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d62a097
|
Well, I did my best,' said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. 'But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it's not your minds I need to change.' And he glanced round at the contents of the ship's hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.
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philosophy
vegan
vegetarian
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Michel Faber |
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b0d9007
|
The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.
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Michel Faber |
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7a0cf22
|
Un solo dia dedicado a cosas que no alimentan el espiritu es un dia robado, mutilado y arrojado a la alcantarilla del destino.
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Michel Faber |
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9540f42
|
All sens of purpose, of responsibility, indeed of any imaginable future, were removed from her by the deaths of her husband and child. It was they who used to make her life a story, they who seemed to be giving it a beginning, a middle and an end. Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date, full of meaningless events for Colonel Leek to recite when no one's paying attention. For all the use she is to Society, beyond in..
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Michel Faber |
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c481465
|
Drying herself with the hem of her shift, she notes that her two candles are dimming; one of them is already a guttering stub. Will she light new ones? Well, that depends on what time of night it is, and Caroline has no clock. Few people in Church Lane do. 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. This ..
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Michel Faber |
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a33d1f2
|
Their consciousness was rudimentary.
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Michel Faber |
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bccacc9
|
To be brutally honest, all these men were falling apart, hair by hair and tooth by tooth, like over-used pieces of equipment, like tools bought cheap for a job that would outlast them. While
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Michel Faber |
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c1eef54
|
Ach,' she says. 'There ain't nuffink in this world but men and women, is there? So you got to care about 'em, ain't you, else what you got to care about?
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Michel Faber |
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5df4d24
|
As Christians, we should spread the love of Christ. If we do our job right, we'll create people who don't want to do wrong.
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Michel Faber |
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39b7bd4
|
Billy's one and only moment of candor was when I parked him in front of my computer to play a game. He took one look at the Noah's Ark display and his whole face flinched like someone had hit him. He told me that the snow leopard is extinct. The last surviving specimen died in a zoo a few weeks back. "The snow leopard was my favorite," he said. Then he sat down at the computer and within about 30 seconds he was lost in a realistic prison in..
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Michel Faber |
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ce390f8
|
He cupped his testicles in his hands, and, with his wrists, pressed his penis hard against his belly until the semen came.
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Michel Faber |
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2ccd388
|
Lose track of time for a moment -just long enough to be overtaken by a hundred and thirty years.
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Michel Faber |
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48289dd
|
bitumen.
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Michel Faber |
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3df296f
|
It burns in her mind, branded there by Mrs Castaway: Wicked is what we can't help being, little one. The word was invented to describe us. Men love to wallow in sin; we are the sin they wallow in.
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Michel Faber |
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11137c0
|
Someone at work said to me this morning, "Where is God in all this?" I didn't rise to the bait. I can never understand why people ask that question. The real question for the bystanders of tragedy is "Where are WE in all this?"
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Michel Faber |
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5ca3394
|
It was a husk, no longer truly their mother - more like their mother's most treasured possession, which had been given to them as a parting gift.
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Michel Faber |
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ecff442
|
protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory.
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Michel Faber |
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e17edf2
|
He didn't want to be like some old-fashioned imperialist missionary, poncing about like Moses in a safari suit, capitalizing on a misconception that he was from the same tribe as Jesus and that God was an Englishman.
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Michel Faber |
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8affde7
|
Locating a past event in measured time was something they could do with great effort, as a special favor, but Peter could tell they didn't see the point. Why should it matter exactly how many days, weeks, months or years ago a relative had died? A person was either living amongst them or in the ground.
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Michel Faber |
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a393361
|
In every Christian's life there comes a time when he or she needs to know the precise circumstances under which God is willing to heal the sick.
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Michel Faber |
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086b5b3
|
There were no oceans on Oasis, no large bodies of water, and presumably no fish. He wondered whether this would cause comprehension problems when it came to certain crucial fish-related Bible stories. There were so many of those: Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the Galilean disciples being fishermen, the whole 'fishers of men' analogy . . . the bit in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven being like a net ca..
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fish
fishers-of-men
fishing-nets
nets
translations
|
Michel Faber |
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e25c64b
|
could indicate the cocky self-awareness of a male in prime condition.
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Michel Faber |
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93f611b
|
behaving as if his actions didn't need defending. Typical rich kid, typical pampered little tycoon. None of their actions ever needed defending, did they?
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Michel Faber |
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9e79c60
|
Their wealth makes them like a different creature, an exotic thing that doesn't have to function like a human.
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Michel Faber |
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9490396
|
She couldn't quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure.
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Michel Faber |
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28660a7
|
Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job.
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technology
|
Michel Faber |
|
0c71ad7
|
how can one sleep while dancing at the edge of waves?
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|
Michel Faber |
|
40dba0c
|
Someone at work said to me this morning, "Where is God in all this?" I didn't rise to the bait. I can never understand why people ask that question. The real question for the bystanders of tragedy is "Where are WE in all this?" I've always tried to come up with answers to that challenge. I don't know if I can at the moment. Pray for me."
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Michel Faber |
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e8d08fd
|
And you know what people immediately start looking for, five minutes after they arrive someplace new? You know what's on their minds? I'll tell you: How are they gonna get laid, and where are they gonna find some mind-altering substances.
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laid
mind-altering-substances
new
people
|
Michel Faber |
|
33980a1
|
There was only so much calamitous change you could hear about, events that rewrote what you thought was general knowledge, before your brain stopped digesting and you clung on to older realities.
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Michel Faber |
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36e62f7
|
facades of the unknown city loomed up before him, harboring unimaginable wonders--his whole life had been leading up to this.
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Michel Faber |
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32d1e2f
|
Era un hombre de muchos planes, pero de poco fruto.
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Michel Faber |
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17f2e8a
|
La curiosidad es el nombre despectivo que los hombres dan a la sed de conocimiento que tienen las mujeres.
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Michel Faber |
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d9956c3
|
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. With God, nothing shall be impossible, proclaimed Luke, and that message, which Peter had always thought was the most joyously positive reassurance you could wish for, now turned itself over like a dying insect, and became Without God, everything shall be impossible.
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Michel Faber |
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cae1563
|
Desconfia de un confort excesivo: engendra irreflexion.
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Michel Faber |