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cbc3ab5
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For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously.
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William T. Vollmann |
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1f4b96a
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Excuse me, my sweetest little Tatianochka, sometimes I forget how time ticks! Well,
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William T. Vollmann |
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c5667ae
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Once again I choose to quote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (If somebody were to ask why I believe that organization instead of one that made opposing claims, I suppose I would say: About scientific matters a scientist is more credible than a non-scientist. A large panel of peer-reviewed scientists, expressing a common judgment, with the caveats and qualifications denoting honesty, increases this credibility from the beginni..
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climate-change
science
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William T. Vollmann |
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2417a9e
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As long as Death keeps himself out of sight in our hot dark future, we need not face facts.
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climate-change-denial
denial
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William T. Vollmann |
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e2adc1f
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So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities.
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William T. Vollmann |
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5a45392
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the sunny times of footsore joy on Arctic islands, for instance, when I reached ice and could glide almost effortlessly through coolness more dazzling than music.
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William T. Vollmann |
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f77bb28
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Bones, murdered or merely perished, ought to stay silent. That's the law. But, quick and shrill as a violin-screech, they come back, to the terror of all who stand guilty of living, and then they dance, playing on their tomb-lids as lightly as cats--but the game's evil, hateful, angry; there's no fun in being a skeleton!
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William T. Vollmann |
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364d5be
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each bullet not a moment but a moment's end...
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William T. Vollmann |
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4c31ba2
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The landscape around us is but a shadow of the landscape within us.
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William T. Vollmann |
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fd11cf1
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I]f I can be sure of any aspect of your character, it is that you are not as I. Since all I can do here is imagine you in my image, of course I have failed. I was as fossil fuels made me. They kept my lights on. Hence I who imagine myself to be open-minded will appear to you as deservedly dead, fossilized in the stratum of my own period's prejudices.
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fossil-fuels
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William T. Vollmann |
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bb0d2d0
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A less negative carbon ideologue then I might interpret the lonely wariness of Mr. Winkler and of Sharon Carlisle as proof of wrongheaded irrelevance. Socrates was equally irrelevant once the Athenians had served him his hemlock. The insipidities of the hollowed out Greeley Tribune, the no comment of most people to whom I "reached out," and the typical anomie of an American metropolis, whose citizens I rarely saw except in their cars, in re..
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William T. Vollmann |
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dd889d2
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As a child he had gone out for Halloween as a mummy, a vampire, a blue-and-green-swolen drowned boy, all kinds of sufferings and mutilations and perversions represented by his costumes; and looking around him he saw witches and Frankenstein monsters and scarred warty masks of all the kids running around asking for candy in the dark; and he wondered: Why must we hurt ourselves and drive stakes through our hearts and drown ourselves in order ..
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William T. Vollmann |
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d3a2c25
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Everywhere that Torah is studied at night one thread-thin ray appears from that hidden light and flows down upon those absorbed in her. --Kabbalah (13th century)
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William T. Vollmann |
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839d0d7
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It's now widely agreed in progressive social circles that all humankind constitutes a single superorganism.
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William T. Vollmann |
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d05db95
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On the radio, Klavdia Sulzhenko sang "The Blue Kerchief." The war had died; that song was getting old; then again, so was I. But" --
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William T. Vollmann |
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90b06b6
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Jimmy decided to get drunk--not just drunk enough to enjoy life (here he grinned, and Cecily smiled back), not just drunk enough to fuck Cecily for instance up the ass without a rubber, not just drunk enough to hear bees buzzing round his ears and wake up in another bad place he'd never seen before with crushed bugs on the walls and men maybe standing over him looking down at him with their teeth drawn away from their lips, and puke cold an..
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William T. Vollmann |
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3f76338
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but the little operative codenamed GREINER, whom I was frankly beginning to consider defeatist, insisted that the Soviets had antidotes to everything, even unfortunate facts. I
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William T. Vollmann |
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0a17707
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I'm sure you've noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven on it. There has to be emotion . . .
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William T. Vollmann |
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9701a80
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as a certain classical slaveholder once wrote, nothing is more painful than days of joy recollected in days of misery. So
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William T. Vollmann |
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50504c4
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But illusions don't die all at once--
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William T. Vollmann |
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665efa2
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By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was.
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William T. Vollmann |
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081d6bc
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the skin of her naked throat was as perfect as a political idea. She
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William T. Vollmann |
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17cae7e
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After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves:
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William T. Vollmann |
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7222414
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Could it be that everything in this world remains so fundamentally pure that nothing can ever be more than half ruined?
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William T. Vollmann |
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754e671
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And so we all write stories to suit ourselves, and I wish happy endings, happy landings to all of us
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William T. Vollmann |
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d29d58a
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We should have known that the only reason that Shostakovich's nightmare restored us to ourselves was so we'd be compelled to drink the cup of anguish. It
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William T. Vollmann |
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ffa36cb
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Life calls for the highest order of deafness; then we can be, so to speak, happy. It
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William T. Vollmann |
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98d050d
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Mitya was almost ready to confess which chord it was which actually caused him to see rainbow icicles. Soon
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William T. Vollmann |
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84a4438
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whatever fate sends us quickly becomes us, and we grow blind to what we might otherwise have been. And
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William T. Vollmann |
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17ec9d8
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Rejected content will come out somewhere else. That
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William T. Vollmann |
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94c11cc
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The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles; that
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William T. Vollmann |
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11b8518
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So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities. Just
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William T. Vollmann |
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77d018b
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A squat black telephone, I mean an octopus, the god of our Signal Corps, owns a recess in Berlin (more probably Moscow, which one German general has named .
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William T. Vollmann |
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a79eafa
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After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now
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William T. Vollmann |
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1d5b74b
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I know it's ridiculous, but I sometimes feel that my love for her is the only thing that's genuine about me.
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William T. Vollmann |
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d44a12f
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The shortest man, codenamed RIMSKY, said to me that freedom means understanding our place within the laws of history; we are more free when we acknowledge our submission to the law of gravity than when we foolishly deny it.
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William T. Vollmann |
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c5c0555
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For propaganda, of course. It's all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?
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William T. Vollmann |
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64d9b3d
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sunglasses make the world quieter and safer, as if you are viewing things behind smoked windows fronting your skull-house: you are inside and the world is outside, and the world cannot see into you; mirror sunglasses double the armor),
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William T. Vollmann |
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25711be
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A pianist can sometimes resemble a slow underwater swimmer, and a lover likewise swims within the sea of the other, far down where no waves can reach; overhead, the piano's lid, heavier than a coffin's, shuts out extraneous vibrations, while simultaneously demarcating the boundary between water and air. It's too perfect underwater; that's what kills us, the perfection!
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William T. Vollmann |
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85ebae4
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The awareness in an animal's eyes is alien beyond knowledge, whereas the gaze from within the dark-glass haunted him because he nearly comprehended it.
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William T. Vollmann |
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b422b4c
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There had been laid down in that place, I was told, the remains of about six million persons--our conventional total for the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust. The crime which the Nazis accomplished with Immense effort in half-a-dozen years, nature had done here without effort or recourse, and was doing.
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William T. Vollmann |
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5d2646d
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Then everything in Germany became black, white and red--the colors of the Third Reich.12 She thought of something that Professor Moholy-Nagy used to say: I don't care to participate in this sort of optical event.
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William T. Vollmann |