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645140a
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All those cows with the same pattern of black and white, all turning their heads at the same time, all mooing in unison (his first love was still cloning) and all feeling pregnant when they were not, didn't seem to be an image she could hold in her head along with the rest of what she knew about life.
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Jane Smiley |
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5caf247
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Joy had never before been to a university party where there were no drinks, and her immediate reaction was that she just couldn't find it, that there was a bar somewhere in the house where a nice young man in a white jacket was pouring out Bloody Marys, but that no one would tell her where it was.
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Jane Smiley |
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c6c98c7
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Laura's gossip was redeemed by its lack of spite. She was warmly objective about every event, taking endless delight in action and complexity, as if she had been bed-ridden in a small windowless room for years and was just now discovering the dramatic possibilities of daily life. She sang Alice through the day.
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Jane Smiley |
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e48d0c5
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Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.
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Jane Smiley |
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5f6050c
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like a man who has jumped off a diving board, but then, through force of will, lowers himself inch by inch into the pool.
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Jane Smiley |
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493a695
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What do you think makes you start laughing and unable to stop?
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Jane Smiley |
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7230968
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Those Latin American and Eastern European novelists aren't any help here. They live inside the mansion of female desire as if it is their right. Their own desire is a nice healthy dog on a string, ready to eat, fuck, fetch, piss on the bushes.
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Jane Smiley |
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d7b3f1a
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DR. LIONEL GIFT IS in bed with Arlen Martin, billionaire, but only in the Washington, D.C., sense.
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Jane Smiley |
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8999fc5
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A girl who made no mistakes about the right shade of lipstick would always land on her feet.
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Jane Smiley |
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c006452
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The plant succession that had begun in March with snowdrops and early crocuses would soon flicker out in a blaze of orange chrysanthemums and show its last pinpoints of color in bittersweet and ash berries hanging like embers in the general misty brown of the world.
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Jane Smiley |
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787f032
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How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink? Which did not mean,
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Jane Smiley |
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48b8d18
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Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon.
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Jane Smiley |
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baa6cad
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but no matter how receptive his pretty and sweet speech therapist looked, no matter how softly and encouragingly she said, "Go ahead, try it. Say it," still, the sounds came out like mooing."
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Jane Smiley |
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a4afc70
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This was an aspect of Barbie-hood that Mary had never given any thought to, that Barbie created Ken, anatomically incorrect to the very core of his brain, where he understood as well as he understood his own name that Barbie was inviolable.
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Jane Smiley |
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09659f2
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If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.
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Jane Smiley |
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8b0fd99
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Don't you want to know what happened?" Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, "No, I don't, because I don't want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you're gonna want to tell it, so don't bother."
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Jane Smiley |
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2f8c7cc
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And she had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?
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Jane Smiley |
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270ee91
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Margret saw that this is how it is that folk are made to desire what they know they should not have, they are made to wait for it, so that when it comes, no matter how dark and full of sin and repellent it is, they are glad enough to welcome it.
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Jane Smiley |
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0c05d31
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that there is such pleasure in enmity that after a while it cannot be left off even if one would will it. Another thing is also true, that when a quarrel is new, one's friends hold one back, and give cool advice, but when it is long-standing, folk put off its end and goad the rivals.
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Jane Smiley |
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23ce291
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This is my thought, that for every soul, something must come to pass, and for everything that does come to pass, every soul can imagine many things that might have come to pass, all of them less evil than what actually fell out. Folk must have something to think on, or they would be unable to hope for Heaven or remember Paradise.
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Jane Smiley |
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75537c2
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To bring him into such agonies as a man should never know, to deny him shrift, to tear his flesh shred from shred. And how will I ever be forgiven for such a lust as this?
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Jane Smiley |
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af97634
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It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.
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Jane Smiley |
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82a9ef2
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So it was with Vigdis' neighbors. Folk recalled how fat she was, how proud, though only the daughter of a cowman, and how niggardly. Serving boys had been beaten for taking a bit of honey, and neighbors had been summoned before the Thing on suspicion of hay stealing or sheep stealing, when anyone could see that the hay had only been used up, and the sheep had only been lost in the hills above the steading.
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Jane Smiley |
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5c3550b
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cats swore that they had pretended to be domesticated to protect themselves--any cat who lived with a human did so under duress, and all cats escaped whenever they could.
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Jane Smiley |
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f5e4600
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However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.
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Jane Smiley |
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dd955ea
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Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people's heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The
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Jane Smiley |
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6f9b357
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And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know themselves, which was to weep and weep and weep.
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Jane Smiley |
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a3546ab
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I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future.
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Jane Smiley |
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271f3ac
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Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine. The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world's details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me. Maybe another way of saying i..
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Jane Smiley |