2240 31 17
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Christmas Eve, 1989, I had dinner with John Updike.
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16313116
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Everyone is botching everything, even the rescue team. They can't get to me. I am surrounded by people who don't know a fatal wound when they see one. I am so determined to live that I become bossy.
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17403116
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I don’t remember the name of the boy in high school
or if I cried at his funeral
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24633124
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Write a list of what's wrong with everyone else.
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8463118
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... “All power is just behind your belly. Look. Knot of belt – just in front of navel – navel is eye of chi.” ...
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42103118
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He didn’t hug me. He didn’t hug any of us. Instead, he shook my hand, his grip so firm I felt the bones of my hands crumbling in on themselves.
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3883120
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During the liberation, a Jew in the Russian army, asked him who had been the cruelest. My father gave them the name of the farmer who had murdered his father, and was later told the farmer's son was sent to the front and killed.
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57473116
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We walk to the Narrows from the boutique, fortified by talk of men and fashion. The Narrows is a blues bar known for outbreaks of small violence. I am wearing the winter white swing coat I bought for the wedding and the gold and turquoise beads.
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25813120
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Sylvia used his computer to write two-page stories about women who killed themselves with blue pills because the shirts came back from the laundry unpressed and their husbands stayed out late with secretaries. Every story ended with the image it began.
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27033123
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14203111
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They all looked for Vic's leg after the accident.
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17373114
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17983119
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the mighty mountains sighed, and the wide seas heaved
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15073013
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I had felt suddenly lighter and next thing I knew I was watching Leonard Tucker and Sister William from somewhere near the ceiling. I saw myself, too, at my desk, holding my songbook out in front of me like everyone else.
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2009306
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Professor William Purcell, dean of the university's shrinking drama department. Fifty, tall and thin, always well dressed . . .
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21403025
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“Should I go over?” Ma asked, wishing she could freshen her lipstick while finger-combing her frosted hair.
“Sarah, fagodsake, let the man eat in peace. No one wants to have his picture made with food in their mouth,” said Pa.
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16553022
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I wake up in the morning and write her name on the white paper napkin I always place in front of me at the kitchen table as I have my first cup of coffee. I write it throughout the day. Twelve or fifteen times. I've done this for exactly twenty-three days. I always…
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24513015
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We met because I hate the actor Bruce Willis.
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21363015
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For twenty-eight years, Cochran Baines removed a tooth from the mouth of every dead child that spent time on his table.
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43843033
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Once you start telling the truth it's hard to quit. You look around and reasons are everywhere. It's like a new appliance, truth-telling, a can opener that's so good you barely have to turn it.On the phone my sister asks me why I don't come out and see her in San…
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12813020
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We are moments away from the end, and it feels like it.
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16153017
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It was a surprise they put me in a dormitory, not a cell,
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27013015
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After our date, my sister, who has a boyfriend, came over with her Weimaraner. I started instantly to tell her of my sex with Nils. She shirked the conversation, tried to change the subject, and more than once, I persisted. I wanted her to hear about it.
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2117308
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naturally, the windowless ones are the worst.
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24013017
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One of my father’s friends never had a name so everyone called him Dickey Dew because he said that’s what everyone called him after he got his balls shot off in Vietnam. I used to sit on his lap while they played five card draw and he would pretend no
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14953012
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What scares her about libraries are unshelved books, the ones you thumb through while you are waiting for the elevator, because you realize that there are too many books in the world and you are holding that particular book only because it is lost.
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21063019
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I went for a walk to buy coffee, here's what I saw
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2197309
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20713021
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"My mother loses patience when I get sad," I said. "She tells me about the dog."
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21653019
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That spring the war still moved north but we did not go to it any longer.
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