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6235963
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This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause no..
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Philip Roth |
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6d01c62
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I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated, but because, for better or worse, when he was bullied by superior forces that he deemed corrupt it was his nature not to yield--in this inst..
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morals
fair-play
instincts
mores
obstinacy
standards
fairness
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Philip Roth |
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19f087b
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he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about "Basel" more than anything--as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most dis..
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Philip Roth |
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b7dcfc5
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I can't really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted." "Everything is acted." "Whatever. With me there's some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don't have. My life never seems real to me."
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Philip Roth |
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de89cf4
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There it was: the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue of knowing what matters most. The ruthless sense of necessity. The annihilating impulse in the face of an obstacle. Those grand grandstand days when you shrink from nothing and you're only right. Everything is a target; you're on the attack; and you, and you alone, are right.
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Philip Roth |
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d7c7d71
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Terrifying encounters with the end? I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!
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Philip Roth |
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ff6bb63
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If the weather isn't bad and it's a clear night, I spend fifteen or twenty minutes before bedtime out on the deck looking skyward, or, using a flashlight, I pick my way along the dirt road to the open pasture at the peak of my hill, from where I can see, from above the treeline, the whole heavenly inventory, stars unfurled in every direction, and, just this week, the planets Jupiter in the east and Mars in the west. It is beyond belief and ..
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Philip Roth |
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28451c7
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Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it - that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostat..
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Philip Roth |
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475af1f
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What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly be so much to say -- so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that ha..
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loneliness
phones
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Philip Roth |
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fe7a4ac
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No, I won't do it. I will not be locked into your head in this way. I will not participate in this drama for the sake of your fiction. Oh, darling, the hell with your fiction.
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Philip Roth |
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3ab7c69
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Why can't Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems?
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Philip Roth |
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2367753
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In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to.
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Philip Roth |
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1a4abd8
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I think I should learn to get along better with people," he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fraternity pledge pin (wearing it on the chest of the new V-neck pullover in which his mother said he looked so collegiate). Miss Benson's response to his proposed scheme for self-improvement was at once so profound and so simply put that Zuckerm..
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Philip Roth |
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9cd675e
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Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.
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writting
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Philip Roth |
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b275d0c
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There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!
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writer
writing
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Philip Roth |
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1db085d
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Were we just two more rootless jungle-dwelling erotomaniacs creamining in their pre-faded jeans over Historical New England, dreaming the old agrarian dream in their rent-a-car convertible
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Philip Roth |
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6123a54
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they'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown--not even he was that dreadful a novelist.
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dreadful-a-novelist
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Philip Roth |
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2c742e7
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But to wish oneself into another's glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you are.
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Philip Roth |
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7320f7b
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time having transformed his own body into a storehouse for man-made contraptions designed to fend off collapse... there was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us.
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Philip Roth |
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52ee07f
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Perhaps,' I wearily suggest, 'reading is the opiate of the educated classes.' 'Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?' he says, lighting up a new cigar.
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Philip Roth |
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2adc3fc
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But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising--didn't make it to the airport,...--and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I'd seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug ..
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kike
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Philip Roth |
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020c0f1
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You fight your superficiality, you shallowness, as as to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untank-like as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you..
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illusion
truth
judgement
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Philip Roth |
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213a912
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We're the sons appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting physical pain, useless at beating and clubbing, unfit to pulverize even the most deserving enemy, though not necessarily without turbulence, temper, even ferocity. We have teeth as the cannibals do, but they are there, imbedded in our jaws, the better to help us articulate. When we lay waste, when we efface, it isn't with raging fists or ruthless schemes or insane sprawlin..
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Philip Roth |
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e20d631
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In the ass is how you create loyalty.
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Philip Roth |
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26f95aa
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No importa cuanto sepas, no importa cuanto pienses, no importa cuanto maquines, finjas y planees, no estas por encima del sexo. Es un juego muy arriesgado. Uno no tendria dos tercios de los problemas que tiene si no corriera el albur de la jodienda. El sexo es lo que desordena nuestras vidas normalmente ordenadas.
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Philip Roth |
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7075efe
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D`f lakhryn qd yHTWmk blqdr ldhy tstTy` qwthm 'n tf`l dhlk
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Philip Roth |
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0e06f38
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nothing is more uplifting in all of life than righteous anger.
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Philip Roth |
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269daac
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All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. As
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Philip Roth |
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6741f84
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Sera que considero esta inquietacao, este desvario, como uma doenca - ou como um talento? Como ambos? Pode ser. Ou sera que e apenas um meio de fuga? Olhe, pelo menos nao me encontro casado, aos trinta e poucos, com uma criatura decente, cujo corpo deixou de ter para mim qualquer interesse genuino - pelo menos nao tenho de ir para cama todas as noites com alguem que vez por outra marreto por obrigacao, ao inves de desejo. Quero referir-me a..
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Philip Roth |
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873c4db
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Forse e tutto cio che sono realmente: un leccatore di figa, una bocca schiava del buco femminile. Lecca! E cosi sia! Forse la soluzione piu saggia per me e vivere a quattro zampe! Strisciare attraverso la vita ingozzandomi di passera, lasciando che a raddrizzare i torti e a fare i padri di famiglia siano le creature erette!
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Philip Roth |
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7dd1f52
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I DON'T WANT TO LEAVE IT UP TO A CHILD TO DECIDE TO EAT JESUS. I HAVE THE HIGHEST RESPECT FOR WHATEVER YOU DO, BUT MY GRANDCHILD IS NOT GOING TO EAT JESUS. I'M SORRY. THAT IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. HERE'S WHAT I'LL DO FOR YOU. I'LL GIVE YOU THE BAPTISM. THAT'S ALL I CAN DO FOR YOU.
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Philip Roth |
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10d5c5d
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The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order.
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Philip Roth |
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4d66ff7
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The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.
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wrong
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Philip Roth |
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b78932b
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For her, being an American was loathing America, but loving America was something he could not let go of any more than he could let go of loving his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency. How could she "hate" this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the "rotten system" that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her..
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Philip Roth |
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91a958e
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Son, anything can happen to anyone," my father told me, "but it usually doesn't."
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life
happenings
probability
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Philip Roth |
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5c0fcb6
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Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness - blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar - I'd loved since childhood, perhap..
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Philip Roth |
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0dd35c4
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Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness- just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star.
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Philip Roth |
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99d899c
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For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.
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writing
life-of-the-writer
routine
habits
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Philip Roth |
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1455808
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They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a half, those bones were the things that mattered most. They were all that mattered, despite the impingement of the neglected cemetery's environment of decay..
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Philip Roth |
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1bc2dce
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It's a big deal for working people to buy a diamond," he told his sons, "no matter how small. The wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this guy is not just a plumber -- he's a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable. A piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere ..
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Philip Roth |
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3410665
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There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.
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Philip Roth |
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f337b7b
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The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair.
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Philip Roth |
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f911983
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Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made...
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love
greek
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Philip Roth |
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3d52ad3
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It's about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences." "Oh,"
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Philip Roth |