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ae3e38e
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And in the complicated, relished, introspective web of young lovers, or more exactly, young petters, they progress along the oldest channel in the world and the most deceptive, for they are certain it is unique to them. Even as they are calling themselves engaged, they are losing the details of their subtle involved pledging of a troth. They are moved and warmed by intimacies between them, by long husky conversations in the parlor, in inexp..
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Norman Mailer |
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22a5894
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It takes all kinds to make a world.
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Norman Mailer |
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272777c
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The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful.
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Norman Mailer |
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84c811b
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His decision had been made in the valley, and it lay as an iron warp in his mind. He could have turned back no more easily than he could have killed himself.
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Norman Mailer |
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5c00839
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Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
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war
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Norman Mailer |
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16131cb
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There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power.
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Norman Mailer |
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a80c829
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A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode.
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Norman Mailer |
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86cbe06
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So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
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Norman Mailer |
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8a30cc4
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His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of th..
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Norman Mailer |
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690d99e
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rip the prisons open put the convicts on television
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television
convicts
criminal
prisons
prisoners
tv
usa
jail
criminals
prison
guilty
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Norman Mailer |
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a805315
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Listen my love the hour is late my side has an ache If you don't get a taxi my heart will break
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Norman Mailer |
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c482653
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As the Maestro is never loath to tell us, a human who suffers from too much ambition succeeds only in exemplifying the Creator's own lack of anticipation. The D.K., wishing His Vision to be innovative, had created the human will as an instinct all but free of Him. Once again, God had miscalculated.
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Norman Mailer |
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f5754a8
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Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us.
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Norman Mailer |
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c4afcdb
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Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers' lives.
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Norman Mailer |
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894637c
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I tell you, say the rich, the poor are naught but dirty wind welling in air-shafts over the cinders and droppings of the past, their voices thick with grease and ordure, sewer-greed to corrode the ear with the horrors of the past and the voids of new stupidity. One could drown waiting for the poor to make one fine distinction. Yes, destroy us say the rich and you lose the roots of God.
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wealth
squalor
rich
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Norman Mailer |
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cedf364
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Perhaps the measure of the best art is that it does not excite envy.
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Norman Mailer |
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6382a7b
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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
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Norman Mailer |
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6dc2f8f
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The Creator had His relative successes and His abysmal failures. While it must be admitted that He never gave up, even if He was not always in firm control of the earth He had fashioned, it is also incontestable that earthquakes and ice ages brought many an interruption to His experiments and savaged many of His pursuits. Why? Because He had incorrectly designed this globe of earth in the first place.
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Norman Mailer |
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0544f8f
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I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.) I will say that having read the best and worst of novels for many years, which is, to remind you, part of a good devil's education, I know by now that not even a loyal reader can stay true to an author who is ready to leave his narrative for an apparently unrelated expedition.
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Norman Mailer |
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1e931cc
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Years ago in 1959 when Dellinger was already an editor on Liberation (then an anarchist-pacifist magazine, of worthy but not very readable articles in more or less vegetarian prose) Mailer had submitted a piece, after some solicitation, on the contrast between real obscenity in advertising, and alleged obscenity in four-letter words. The piece was no irreplaceable work of prose, and in fact was eventually inserted quietly into his book, Adv..
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Norman Mailer |
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e8158a2
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Metaphor reveals a writer's true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life.
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Norman Mailer |
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9a4d0b0
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It is not uncommon for fighters' camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one's life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing.
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boxing
fighters
training
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Norman Mailer |
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c6688fd
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Retaining the phrases was a treacherous enterprise, however. His greatest problem these days had been boredom. Now he had discovered its loyal assistant--poor memory!
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Norman Mailer |
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43e2d49
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Einai mallon phanero ap' osa eipa eos tora oti okhi mono eimai uparxistes, alla phtano kai sto semeio na po oti den gnorizoume te phuse mas. Aplos mathainoume ton eauto mas oso zoume te zoe mas. Kai oso mathainoume toso genniountai mesa mas erotemata.
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Norman Mailer |
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f43be87
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the Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.
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Norman Mailer |
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b91fdf1
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You know," he laughed easily, "with all the goddam drinkin' Ah've done, Ah still can't remember the taste of it unless Ah got the bottle right with me."
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Norman Mailer |
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d2ba2c0
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He knew that again now. Hennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and portents of power.
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Norman Mailer |
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7d69850
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Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was one, but that was unfair; it wasn't as if he took an interest, it was just an accident of birth.
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Norman Mailer |
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0438f5e
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American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.
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Norman Mailer |
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39c937f
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Hearn's death was happily smudged, or at least on the surface, but ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his punishment, and cannot remember his crime.
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Norman Mailer |
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64ed41d
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He does see Himself as the Divine Artist. Of course, He is also a blunderer--so many of His creations are botched. A good many are disasters which He then proceeds to plow back into the food chain. That is His only means of keeping His multitudinous, mediocre, and often meaningless spawnings from choking the existence of the rest. Yet, I will admit, He is dogged. He is still looking to improve His previous creations.
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Norman Mailer |
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177b8af
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It is easy to comprehend people who are weaker than ourselves, but it is not as simple to be ready for the true feelings of those more powerful.
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Norman Mailer |
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7c3cac6
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Certain kinds of honor could not be lost without demanding that one consecrate oneself thereafter--no matter how unsuited and unprepared--to a life of revenge. I
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Norman Mailer |
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ef02459
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On choosing to write the book in third person, and using his name Norman as the nom de plume) NOW, OUR MAN of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good dea..
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third-person
narcissism
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Norman Mailer |
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89a5097
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How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse.
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hatred
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Norman Mailer |
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58602d6
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Goldstein, you'd be a pretty good boy if you wasn't so chicken.
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cowardice
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Norman Mailer |
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f7c2cf2
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It was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of a woman who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.
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Norman Mailer |
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1a9a2db
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it all seems more reasonable and possible until you put it figuratively, until the metaphorical end, which is always the muzzle if you come down to it, blasts you in the face.
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Norman Mailer |
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5a92c3f
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Don't bug me or I'll gas you said the creep
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Norman Mailer |
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b1f5484
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Love was here today and left us dry did we deserve Him?
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Norman Mailer |
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56a5d4c
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You let everything stand until it's knocked over and then you go over and write your own ruins
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Norman Mailer |
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0a6efd7
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We find, therefore, Lowell and Mailer ostensibly locked in converse. In fact, out of the thousand separate enclaves of their very separate personalities, they sensed quickly that they now shared one enclave to the hilt: their secret detestation of liberal academic parties to accompany worthy causes. Yes, their snobbery was on this mountainous face close to identical--each had a delight in exactly the other kind of party, a posh evil social ..
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Norman Mailer |
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33f2acf
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Sequestered in the depths of the average pacifist--as one will invariably discover--resides a killer. That is why the person has become a pacifist in the first place.
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Norman Mailer |
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d35ff42
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What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers--there are only questions.
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Norman Mailer |