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0d650a9
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Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.
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Walter Kirn |
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9285481
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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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Walter Kirn |
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02f46cc
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I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.
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Walter Kirn |
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779dfb9
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He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.
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Walter Kirn |
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7c60126
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I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
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artists
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Walter Kirn |
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7221fec
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To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your "Core Attachments," means apologizing for your very existence."
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Walter Kirn |
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b3b3144
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Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.
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Walter Kirn |
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0da0491
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Love is a powerful painkiller.
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Walter Kirn |
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c78172b
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Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth's total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism.
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Walter Kirn |
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1bbd752
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How soon human beings forget what a privilege it is to live in freedom. A privilege, not an honor. An honor would mean we deserved it. We do not.
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Walter Kirn |
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635064f
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The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.
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Walter Kirn |
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fcc1024
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You long for a windfall that will let you quit and pursue your great hobby
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Walter Kirn |
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f8e8b5b
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The atom was split by persistence.
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Walter Kirn |
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0165ceb
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It's the little deceptions that no one catches that are going to dissolve it all someday. We'll look at clocks and we won't believe the hands. They'll forecast sun but we'll pack our slickers anyway.
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Walter Kirn |
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67c1681
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Liars are exhausting people.
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Walter Kirn |
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a61343a
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Frustration comes from fighting your own momentum.
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Walter Kirn |
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5bd7111
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Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.
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Walter Kirn |
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eabbd7e
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He lived in two modes, the apparent and the veiled, and in two realms, the opera and the sewer, and he shuttled between them like a genie.
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Walter Kirn |
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eb12f7a
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The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
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Walter Kirn |
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e072cb9
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A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.
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Walter Kirn |
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1b8455f
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If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I'd opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think.
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Walter Kirn |
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fcc492d
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What is it in people, or just in people like me, that would rather let a lie go by, would rather wish it away or minimize it, than point it out and cause the liar embarassment?
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Walter Kirn |
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4b89b3e
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Bailey, a former prosecutor, attacked her credibility scattershot, an approach he would use throughout the trial, particularly with female witnesses. ... He accused her, that is--without coming out and saying it--of being a certain kind of woman: conceited, disingenuous, and dissatisfied. The universal misogynist caricature. I'd never gone in for academic gender theories, but Bailey's cross-examination strategy--with Farrar and other women ..
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misogynist
gender
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Walter Kirn |
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2356acb
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Thoughts are thoughts and that's all they are.
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Walter Kirn |
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6befa58
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She's everything I wanted when I was young and everything I distrust now that I'm not.
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Walter Kirn |
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994287c
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We're a telephone family, strung out along the wires, sharing our news in loops and daisy chains. We don't meet face-to-face much, and when we do there's a dematerialized feeling, as though only half of our molecules are present.
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Walter Kirn |
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1d9d2a2
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Though I no longer liked him or respected him, the thought of his disapproval frightened me.
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Walter Kirn |
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d732c16
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I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes.
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Walter Kirn |
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a6e7d81
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His thoughts were clearly still shoving him further away, toward some ultimate dark drama that he might or might not have actually lived through but whose telling would let out the pressure inside his skull.
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Walter Kirn |
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2f8eea6
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Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface.
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Walter Kirn |
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253b0ef
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I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining having never been born yourself.
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Walter Kirn |
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54ad404
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We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.
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writing
truth
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Walter Kirn |
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c649719
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Leslie Titmuss bothered me. His name, it made me want to sneeze. I also thought I recognized it. I typed it into my laptop, a procedure that had lately held far too much suspense for me. Among the top results the search returned was a page from GoodReads, a literary website.
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Walter Kirn |
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c3e99a0
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What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
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Walter Kirn |
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00da6f8
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truth from him, is a swan dive through a mirror into a whirlpool.
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Walter Kirn |
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e450c75
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It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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Walter Kirn |
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ee2c4e8
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Our faith was a flickering flame.
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Walter Kirn |
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c433484
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They were gray, staring, bottomless, blank, fallen eyes whose pupils played scenes of heaven upside down.
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Walter Kirn |
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6fd6f78
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Eyewitness News' is a clever plot to convince us that all the important events are happening somewhere else, to other people, at the same time we're literally dying in our beds.
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Walter Kirn |
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a72c227
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I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood.
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Walter Kirn |
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537216d
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Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.
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Walter Kirn |
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a160172
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Their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word.
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Walter Kirn |
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d9ef734
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Reliving his degradation had struck some spark in him and it was glowing now like a blown-on coal.
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Walter Kirn |
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9b0f3b9
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I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.
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Walter Kirn |