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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 |
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0e760ea
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Better by far that famous poster of the Red Army woman with one hand on her hip, another on her bemedaled breast, standing sentry-straight before a bullet-pocked German wall, her red-starred cap at an angle to show off her hair (short, yet feminine) as she smiles into the sideways future! Thus runs the Russian view. On the other side we merely need to quote our Fuhrer's dictum that the Germans--this is essential--will have to constitute amo..
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William T. Vollmann |
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59618a4
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We each must fulfill our own obligation.
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William T. Vollmann |
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7b5e82e
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Socioeconomic formations versus an officer's heels on a parquet floor, which would I choose?
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William T. Vollmann |
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107acf6
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Had he won the battle of Stalingrad, he would have been sitting there, too; for any war against our Soviet Union must be a lost war. (That
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William T. Vollmann |
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35443ac
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As the great Moltke used to say, Genius is diligence.
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William T. Vollmann |
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92165f4
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he had always longed to let himself go, sinking and spinning into something greater than himself; and his mind quite naturally worked to consider every facet of every question; so when he was with Coca, who transformed twenty facets into twenty thousand, he could get dizzy if he weren't careful; so he always avoided drawing her into his own perplexities; what
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William T. Vollmann |
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843ddd5
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Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information. I
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William T. Vollmann |
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32cc201
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L. Moholy-Nagy once wrote: Penetration of the body with light is one of the greatest visual experiences. And so I came back into my Germany, the real Germany, where the sunlight was as white as Heydrich's hands.
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William T. Vollmann |
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8a28537
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E. Kruglikova, who in real life might never have met him (I have no confirmed information on this), smiled lustrously; she was wearing a formal black dress and a necklace of frozen tears. Their friends applauded, thereby imitating static on a clandestine radio.
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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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science
climate-change
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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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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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d1dfec1
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Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a ..
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William T. Vollmann |
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d8298be
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The things you love too much perish"--After Shostakovich and Volkov, p. 78. The composer goes on: "You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear."
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William T. Vollmann |
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8bec649
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All this is the flimsiest speculation, which is God's gift to historical fictioneers.
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William T. Vollmann |
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493f616
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those T-34s? Better not to look! I see you shining, my beloved, chaotic, all-knowing, heartless Russia. Stalin's daughter Svetlana wrote that.
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William T. Vollmann |
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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 |