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e80ce36
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but when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone's disbelief--at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Be..
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Norman Mailer |
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e2e7323
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If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men?
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Norman Mailer |
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9b0bfbd
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Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus which comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blond wig.
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Norman Mailer |
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af549e2
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Piety can also serve as a wall to keep the pious from recognizing how profoundly angry they are at God--this God who has failed to treat them by what they see as their proper right.
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Norman Mailer |
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86b6f91
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Repetition kills the soul.
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Norman Mailer |
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e8c98d7
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I suspect Kierkegaard had just that in mind when he proposed that people had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings.
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Norman Mailer |
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b061710
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He had also been married to an English girl who was killed in a car accident, a fact to mention because he was the driver. His sorrow was complete; it was as if he had been dipped into a tragic rue. This loss permeated every pore and organ cell, left him, indeed, a complete man, all of one piece, one whole tincture of loss. He spoke in a gentle voice and listened to every word that everyone said, as if words were as much of a comfort as war..
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Norman Mailer |
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dbed623
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More sensitive than others in the beginning, we have to develop the will, the stamina, the determination, and the insensitivity to take critical abuse. A good writer, therefore, does well to see himself as a strong, weak person, full of brave timidity, sensitive and insensitive.
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Norman Mailer |
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87be613
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He was full of love--for himself, first, and his prowess--such a fine power at his age. Then, he felt a degree of love for her--
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Norman Mailer |
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a73650a
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Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer?
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Norman Mailer |
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adc234a
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Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier...Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and ..
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wwii
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Norman Mailer |
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9ee5a40
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By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether.
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Norman Mailer |
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74cf5ab
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It aroused my paranoia (which is always there in ready supply, since it is preferable to poor powers of anticipation).
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Norman Mailer |
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24df0d8
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It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics. Bess
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Norman Mailer |
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db6f607
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There remained a hole drilled through his heart.
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Norman Mailer |
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b42e3f1
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Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.
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Norman Mailer |
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79dc6eb
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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow old or else pay more for remaining the same.
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Norman Mailer |
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3c35d37
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not for nothing had Lenin pointed out that there were ten years which passed like an uneventful day, but there was also the revolutionary day which was like ten years.
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Norman Mailer |
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b7c2d01
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country people do not have enough to do with their minds. Their backs are strong, but their lives--year after year, it is the same. They are tired of being bored. So they start to think about the wrongs that have been done to them.
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Norman Mailer |
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e341a5d
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Mi resi conto, allora, che l'unico vero collaudo della forza - del tono muscolare, per cosi dire - della sanita mentale e la capacita di sostenere l'urto di un interrogativo dietro l'altro senza che vi sia neanche l'ombra di una risposta.
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Norman Mailer |
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16826cd
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Finally he said, "I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote." It wasn't so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life by Irving Stone."
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Norman Mailer |
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44f68c1
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Since I believe that I have been a devil for many centuries and have risen in rank and been demoted, it could be asked why, with such a history, I still learned a good deal while in Russia. It is because a newly gained sophistication fades once a venture comes to an end. So we develop many new qualities of mind, but soon lose them.
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Norman Mailer |
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c454d80
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Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.
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Norman Mailer |
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bda560e
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Then the Warden said, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, "Let's do it." That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he'd ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line."
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Norman Mailer |
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1f133e3
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It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then
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Norman Mailer |
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a915660
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I know everything about love but Love itself.
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Norman Mailer |
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796315d
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About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their lives. One of the infrequent rations of beer was given out the same night, and the men finished their three cans quickly, and sat about without saying very much. The beer had been far too inadequate to make them drunk; it made them only moody ..
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war
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Norman Mailer |
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6568220
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Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification--patriotism!
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Norman Mailer |
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c04caf0
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Politics at national level can still be comprehended by politics-as-property provided one remembers that moral integrity (or the public impression of such) in a high politician is also property, since it brings power and/or emoluments to him. Indeed a very high politician--which is to say a statesman or leader--has no political substance unless he is the servant of ideological institutions or interests and the available moral passions of th..
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Norman Mailer |
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0274f50
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Craft protects one from facing endless expanding realities--the terror, let us say, of losing your novel in the depths of philosophical insights you are not ready to live with.
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Norman Mailer |
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3c45a57
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I live by the law of averages," said Alois. "I prefer to think of the ongoing possibility of profit rather than of the intermittent perils that surround all activity."
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Norman Mailer |
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eabbd7d
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You men are a bunch of god-damned women.
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Norman Mailer |
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261d3b9
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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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2bb3a15
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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.)
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Norman Mailer |
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bd56827
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She was one old lady who had the real heat of suspicion--it irritated her when the silver count was correct (as it always was) because paranoia that cannot be confirmed is more difficult to bear than a loss from outright theft.
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Norman Mailer |
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0a6df08
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Alois did not know (or care that much) whether men and women had souls, but he was in no doubt about dogs. They did, and you had to be loyal to the soul of a dog.
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Norman Mailer |
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996e944
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Either the century was entrenching itself more deeply into the absurd, or the absurd was delivering evidence that it was possessed of some of the nutritive mysteries of a marrow which would yet feed the armies of the absurd.
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Norman Mailer |
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5c96ebb
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Was it an hour, or a week before the light of the moon rose in the interior of my body? A bird with luminous wings flew in front of that full moon, and its head was as radiant as a point of light. That bird must be the Khu--this sweet bird of the night--a creature of divine intelligence loaned to us just so much as the Ren or the Sekhem. Yes, the Khu was a light in your mind while you lived, but in death, it must return to heaven. For the K..
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Norman Mailer |
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5a93534
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Arrayed against them as hard-core troops: an elite! the Freud-ridden embers of Marxism, good old American anxiety strata--the urban middle-class with their proliferated monumental adenoidal resentments, their secret slavish love for the oncoming hegemony of the computer and the suburb, yes, they and their children, by the sheer ironies, the sheer ineptitude, the kinks of history, were now being compressed into more and more militant stands,..
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Norman Mailer |
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725b3df
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I must purchase this eunuch from You," she said to Ptah-nem-hotep, Who smiled agreeably. "Are they not delightful?" He asked, and looked at the dark bodies of these five slaves with the same love I had seen my great-grandfather give to a team of matched horses or twin bulls, and indeed, since the slave wore nothing, one could see not only their plump and muscular haunches, but the shiny stump where their testicles had been and this gave the..
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eunuch
gelding
haunches
testicles
slaves
horses
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Norman Mailer |
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aa488c8
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When an officer of the law detects a vice in himself, he knows enough to start looking for its presence in others.
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Norman Mailer |
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a9d80bd
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Angels often flee from people who scream too loudly--they know at such moments how close the man or woman is to us, and they feel outnumbered. For devils rush in to attend such outcries.
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Norman Mailer |
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eeb4803
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Since the sum of her experience had told her that the majority of one's prayers to God were not answered, she prayed now directly to us, she called upon the Devil, she implored him.
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Norman Mailer |
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4836205
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Freaks can be a fount of information.
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Norman Mailer |