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93399fd
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As she left her parents' neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d6ba47f
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Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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51c7732
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It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be less affluent than these T-shirted, joke-cracking fatsos-
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3afd8a7
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He had three ancient candy thermometers whose metal casings were shaped like fraternity paddles and whose nature it was to show no increase in temperature for several hours and the, and all at once and all together, to register temperatures at which fudge burned and toffee hardened like epoxy.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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9614f1d
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The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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6b4a0fb
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Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bd57857
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The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2f96195
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Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He'd never stop asking, 'Can I do this to you? Is this okay?
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Jonathan Franzen |
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df437ac
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The interesting people are always immoderate.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1548165
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He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ab00420
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Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days - spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive - I was probably most afraid of my parents.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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ec073e3
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You can think of me thinking of you, because that's what I'll be doing whenever you think of me.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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862211e
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This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a4a8017
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Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading - to reconnect to that community."
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readers-life
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e39580d
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But in the world of consumer advertising and consumer purchasing, no evil is moral. The evils consist of high prices, inconvenience, lack of choice, lack of privacy, heartburn, hair loss, slippery roads. This is no surprise, since the only problems worth advertising solutions for are problems treatable through the spending of money. But money cannot solve the problem of bad manners--the chatterer in the darkened movie theater, the patronizi..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5edfdf3
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I'm telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d9a9dd1
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So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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bfc8f5b
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My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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17a85a0
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Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn. In Hepburn's eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8b5f6e1
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Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field carried the smell of thawed winter earth, the great sorrowful world-smell of being alive beneath a sky.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f8414d8
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Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction...
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Jonathan Franzen |
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de38a8f
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When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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1ca29ac
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Zachary's mother, Lucy, waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that never interested her. Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence --the drama of being her-- was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. K..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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33d8a06
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V p'rvite shumove na zapochvane na rabota sutrin se krie opasna t'ga, siakash tishinata ia boli, zadeto e bila obezpokoena. P'rviiat mig ot rabotniia den napomnia za vsichki ostanali migove, ot koito se s'stoi deniat, a nak'svaneto na vremeto na zaltsi ne nosi nishcho dobro. Chak sled kato k'm goliia, samoten p'rvi mig se pris'ediniat i drugi, deniat se ustanoviava po-tsialostno kato den.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3e99a62
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The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He
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Jonathan Franzen |
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3119740
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When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5e64706
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The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b4f5622
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As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2ef09a6
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She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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4a424f2
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Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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95fde04
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She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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b1b7714
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He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a15689b
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He didn't understand what happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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9965f2d
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The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie...
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Jonathan Franzen |
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a6faa65
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Birds were what became of dinosaurs. Those mountains of flesh whose petrified bones were on display at the Museum of Natural History had done some brilliant retooling over the ages and could now be found living in the form of orioles in the sycamores across the street. As solutions to the problem of earthly existence, the dinosaurs had been pretty great, but blue-headed vireos and yellow warblers and white-throated sparrows - feather-light,..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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e14e5dc
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Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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686b817
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I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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d410107
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For the next two hours Denise mainly paid attention to her hand, which she'd laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of Robin's. The hand wasn't comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn't want to give up hard-won territory. When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn't take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcom..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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609ae54
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L'integrita e un valore neutro. Anche le iene hanno una loro integrita. Sono iene allo stato puro.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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5f20ded
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You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction--no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.
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parenting
punishment
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Jonathan Franzen |
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2451817
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Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them. If we see religion and art as the historically preferred methods of coming to terms with this Ache, then what happens to art when our technological and economic systems and even our commercialized religions become sufficiently sophisticated to make each of us..
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Jonathan Franzen |
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f07cb12
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that the more he rebelled against his parents and the more he made his life a reproach to theirs, the more deeply he rooted himself in the same childish relation to them.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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8486efb
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The man who 'forgets' his toothbrush in a woman's house is a man who wants to come back.
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Jonathan Franzen |
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da260f3
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Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete.
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Jonathan Franzen |