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98c369f
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Slow, tick decides. Thinks happen slow. she isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is. ...Take her parents- At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in dissatisfaction and need....Mybe
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Richard Russo |
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4279a8d
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La verdad no sirve como sustituto de una buena respuesta.
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Richard Russo |
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db81b3d
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One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you'd tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Miss Beryl looked for in each adult face was the evidence of some failed lesson in some distant yesterday that might predict incompetence today.
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Richard Russo |
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f1f4d37
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It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares.
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Richard Russo |
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916e86e
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Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own....Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer. Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues ..
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Richard Russo |
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f6e6511
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You get more misanthropic every day. - I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.
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Richard Russo |
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3e82330
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Alas, he himself was a man too easily encouraged, too completely seduced by hope, only to be devastated by disappointment. He'd been born to privilege, conditioned to expect things would go well, and pathetically unable to cope once they started to go wrong.
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Richard Russo |
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f1ad91b
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By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference.
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Richard Russo |
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eda13b6
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He clearly regarded finding the glove compartment locked now as a disappointing development. Like arriving someplace for dinner, assuming you'd be welcome, and finding your place setting in the cupboard.
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Richard Russo |
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90adbf2
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Non basta una vita "One life isn't enough"
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Richard Russo |
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e98e126
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Max would conclude, "that's who I want to be. The pope. And I'll do the same thing he does. I'll keep all the goddamn money."
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money
pope
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Richard Russo |
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96efcca
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Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.
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Richard Russo |
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56445af
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imagination without energy remains inert...
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Richard Russo |
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2e53975
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For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.
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Richard Russo |
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e3859f0
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He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.
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Richard Russo |
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0a42f18
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Mr. Purty has cheered me up. The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seriously, its relentless heartbreak notwithstanding... (Richard Russo, Straight Man)
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Richard Russo |
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9b77eea
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Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque.
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Richard Russo |
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2c299a9
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These are not men of great imagination, but one can hardly blame them for not being prepared for this particular contingency, the sight of a tweet-jacketed, tenured, middle-aged, senior professor and department chair in a fake nose and glasses, brandishing a live, terrified goose... (Richard Russo, Straight Man)
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Richard Russo |
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ea9a362
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Hell, at twenty, he'd been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.
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Richard Russo |
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ccfcbfe
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Whereas some people's attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn't, Mrs. Whiting's implied that she knew everything you didn't. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.
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Richard Russo |
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ab8294f
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probably horse doo had a name in french also, but that didn't mean god intended for you to eat it.
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Richard Russo |
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59a2be0
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Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?
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Richard Russo |
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6dda29d
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Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man.
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sports
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Richard Russo |
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29d96b8
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You've become a clever man.
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Richard Russo |
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dde2858
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Rub wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I just wisht--" "What?" Rub sighed. Where to begin? "That I'd be nicer to you?" He shrugged again, but this was the gist of it, Sully could tell. "I wish I would, too," he said, and for some reason this seemed to cheer Rub up."
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Richard Russo |
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e9417a6
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The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who'd taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl's arm with some annoyance, as if she'd have preferred it to assume some other shape. Miss Beryl knew just how the woman felt.
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Richard Russo |
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1dfd637
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Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully's opinion. Girl.
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Richard Russo |
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c26bf5c
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I also think it's possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today." He had no idea, of course, whether any of these things were true, in whole or in part. Still, what possible good could come of believing otherwise? --"
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Richard Russo |
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c0af028
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He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn't understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.
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Richard Russo |
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e60ba1e
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A plot, I used to remind my students, is not merely a sequence of events: "A" followed by "B" followed by "C" followed by "D." Rather, it's a series of events linked by cause and effect: "A" causes "B," which causes "C," and so on. True, a person's (or a fictional character's) destiny may be more than the sum of his choices--fate and luck play a role as well--but only scientists (and not all of them) believe that free will is a sham. People..
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Richard Russo |
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402446b
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The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.
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Richard Russo |
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3d4fac0
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Griffin's mother loathed grading papers, too, of course. Who didn't? But she was meticulous about correcting errors, offering style and content suggestions in the margins, asking pointed, often insulting, questions (How long did you work on this?) and then answering them herself (Not long, one hopes, given the result).
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Richard Russo |
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1a626a5
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Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you through a morning. Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years - that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.
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Richard Russo |
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66ca1a2
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the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our own. Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do...Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves.
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Richard Russo |
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2232b60
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After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts' impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?
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Richard Russo |
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96ec6c6
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No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many ..
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wisdom
mistakes
regrets
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Richard Russo |
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15d35dd
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I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again.
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Richard Russo |
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bb45892
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Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time?
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Richard Russo |
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c5acb28
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he was pouring vinegar onto the hot grill, where it sputtered and foamed and hissed. The air was full of it for a few seconds, enough to get everyone at the counter teared up, but just as quickly it was gone, with an implicit promise that anything so intensely horrible would be design pass swiftly.
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Richard Russo |
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cb0b6c6
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Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.
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Richard Russo |
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6cf8260
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She had always seemed to him to be deep-down wild, the wilder because she harnessed that wildness most of the time.
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Richard Russo |
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7bac8df
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My afternoon comp class is not persuaded. In fact, they feel ill-treated...I've read three short essays aloud, anonymously, for the purpose of inspiring discussion or, failing discussion, private misgiving. It's my hope that if the majority of these intellectually addled young folk actually hear their words aloud, if they are forced to digest not only their advice to me but the logic that led to this advice, they will, if not change their m..
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Richard Russo |
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0bc85e5
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Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.
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Richard Russo |
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8d3fe5f
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If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn't, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal to them out of spite. By
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Richard Russo |