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9cde1ac
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Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.
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Russell Banks |
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bbd99ac
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When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.
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loneliness
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Russell Banks |
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516a1a3
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What you believe matters, however. It's all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don't believe anything is true simply because you can't logically prove what's true, you won't do anything. You won't be anything. You'll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It's an old philosophical probl..
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doing
beliefs
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Russell Banks |
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5efb61b
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All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't he fumed, they're
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continental-drift
social-commentary
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Russell Banks |
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846e634
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But when you're a kid it's like you're wearing these binoculars strapped to your eyes and you can't see anything except what's in the dead center of the lenses
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Russell Banks |
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d074998
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Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men--at least he always did when he was a kid--because they pretend that's what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.
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Russell Banks |
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12883ee
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We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.
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motivational
environmentalism
environment
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Russell Banks |
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30b6e34
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Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter.
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Russell Banks |
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e580300
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Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.
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Russell Banks |
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6768078
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One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another - to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us. And it's why we tell each other stories that we pray will be transformed in the telling by that angel on the roof,..
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Russell Banks |
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1d0db08
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They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn't know the language or how anything here worked and hadn't arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they'd forgotten it so they ..
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Russell Banks |
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1d63e48
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It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone f..
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Russell Banks |
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61efccb
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I was afraid of the consequences of my acts in the right way, beyond guilt, but it was too late. I'd already become the person I should have been afraid of becoming.
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Russell Banks |
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3e83b12
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It's like a crime is an act that when you've committed one the act is over and you haven't changed inside. But when you commit a sin it's like you create a condition that you have to live in.
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Russell Banks |
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7629cac
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They were the only three people I'd chosen on my own to love, and they were gone. But still, that morning in Mobay when I saw Russ for the last time, I saw clearly for the first time that loving Sister Rose and I-Man and even Bruce had left me with riches that I could draw on for the rest of my life, I was totally grateful to them.
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Russell Banks |
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9d3d117
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When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you'll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you'll know.
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Russell Banks |
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c473fa7
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It's a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand.
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the-sweet-hereafter
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Russell Banks |
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94915b3
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Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self.
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russell-banks
the-sweet-hereafter
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Russell Banks |
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d0ee8e3
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Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.
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Russell Banks |
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105326b
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believes in God the way he believes in politicians-he knows He exists but doesn't count on Him for anything.
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Russell Banks |
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a70257e
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Accordons-lui une plus grande capacite a comprendre et a parler le patois jamaiquain, une tolerance accrue pour la flamme vive du rhum blanc, et davantage de respect pour les difficultes qu'on rencontre lorsqu'on veut comprendre quelqu'un d'une autre culture, d'une autre race, d'une autre geographie, d'une autre economie et d'une autre langue - et cela meme alors que je me familiarisais tous les jours davantage avec les subtilites de cette ..
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Russell Banks |
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f3c9361
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my blue eyes peering into their brown eyes and seeing there some essential part of myself, some irreducible aspect of my being, which in turn gave them back the same reflected version of themselves
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Russell Banks |
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f3b103a
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You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it opposes your principles and opinions.' He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved on his mind. 'The largest majority is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral p..
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Russell Banks |
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dfd71e2
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Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.
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Russell Banks |
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733f281
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I've got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It's just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you're a parasite of sorts.
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Russell Banks |
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b3f24e9
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Our obsession with each other was like the isolation that comes with great pain; it was like extreme sadness. Without our children we might have never discovered our differences, which is what has made our abiding love for each other possible.
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Russell Banks |
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4848679
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If you yourself are not a victim, you cannot claim to see the world as the victim does.
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Russell Banks |
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da7f10b
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It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!
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slavery
freedom
race-war
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Russell Banks |
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32dc099
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Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin's as white as the rich man's, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They'd see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don't..
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Russell Banks |
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ac7ba48
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For instance, a man generally doesn't even know how small a woman is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child's and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem.
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russell-banks
the-sweet-hereafter
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Russell Banks |
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36d5c8a
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Car, si je considerais l'homme surtout en termes psychologiques, Smith l'evaluait en termes sociaux et Terron en termes mythiques. Ce qui provoquait en moi une quete irritee de certitude, une insecurite qui me mettait nettement mal a l'aise.
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Russell Banks |
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be3e10e
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Bien que Terron fut un homme qu'apparemment je ne pouvais appeler autrement qu'un fanatique religieux ; bien qu'il menat sa vie d'une maniere qui m'etait encore plus etrangere que celle de M. Mann ; et bien que souvent je fusse arrive a conclure, presque contre ma volonte, qu'il n'etait qu'un arnaqueur ruse de campagne en train d'exploiter mon curieux melange de culpabilite (le raciste americain en moi) et d'amour pour l'esoterique (l'intel..
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Russell Banks |
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a8e01ef
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It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.
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Russell Banks |
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3cc8b5e
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La difference, evidemment, etait qu'ils avaient appris plusieurs siecles auparavant quelque chose que moi, descendant d'un peuple incomparablement plus favorise, je n'avais jamais ete oblige d'acquerir. Ils avaient appris a survivre. La survie etait pour moi un fait qui m'etait accorde d'avance, et il etait donc plus que vraisemblable que dans des circonstances analogues je serais incapable de survivre. Je deviendrais le vieux bougon, l'hom..
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Russell Banks |
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c771c1f
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He can't quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man's deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work.
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Russell Banks |
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df4dd3a
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It's coming to seem the only way to avoid hurting other people, which in his experience is what gives them power over you.
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Russell Banks |
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5066f72
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Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I'll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries.
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Russell Banks |
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23147de
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In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.
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Russell Banks |
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699d6c7
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We pass between sea and sky with unaccountable, humiliating ease, as if there were no firmament between the firmaments, no above or below, here or there, now or then, with only the feeble conventions of language, our contrived principles, and our love of one another's light to keep our own light from going out; abandon any one of them, and we dissolve in darkness like salt in water.
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Russell Banks |