2204 25 11
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After the affair was over, she told her husband she’d been smoking. Obviously he didn’t know, but he knew. One can never hide the fact that one has been smoking.
He said he could smell it on her.
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2203178
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“You don't know what it's like, to be an old man, to be alone man, behind blue eyes,” he said to the downtown city sidewalk. The sidewalk said nothing. People with someplace to go rushed by him, not stopping.
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22033210
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At the bar, she told me her name was Natasha, but she doesn’t look like one. She’s too thin and flighty for one thing. And all Natashas have a Russian accent and talk of the Motherland as if it were never cold and before it turned to borderlines and j
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220278
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Momentarily Winston’s thoughts muddled again. He felt his fingers twitch, a physical sensation which seemed to accompany any recollection from the past. Most of his memories were moments he’d reiterated so many times during his stay in the Ministry of Lov
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2201108
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Fritz Lang. Even before I ever met the miserable son of a bitch, with his monocle and superior airs, I hated him. In person, he was an insufferable asshole.
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22015227
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The gun is heavy. The tiny women hold it in both hands.
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21991711
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Balling my fists, I banged them on the retro-formica tabletop. The taste of pufferfish balls in an oleander-infused reduction with a seaweed and pomegranate side-salad tossed in a geranium-rottweiler vinaigrette rose in my throat.
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219841
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As I sat down finally, finally to write,
some brooding heretical hour of the night, with my ballpoint in hand, poised to blot page, Time gathered momentum, although I did not age...
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2198309
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219831
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When Igor stepped inside the capsule, he had two thoughts: the cramped tin can would either become his victory chariot, or his funeral casket.
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21952121
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So there are these teenagers and they're all dying of cancer, or at least were dying of cancer, or might be dying of cancer, and then a couple of them fall in love and lose their virginity to each other, and these teens, they're all smart and charming and only a little…
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219442
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Six clocks are brought to a tool shed, behind the house (three black, two white, and one red.)
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21932913
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My round belly is deflating. I disappear a little more by the day. It's been weeks. Soon, I may not even be here.
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21912116
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The afternoon my little sister won her first U.S. Open, I was also busy, having strenuous sex with David Solemn, a man I’d met earlier that morning at Dunkin Donuts. We did it on the white living room carpet in my parent’s new Connecticut house while
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21864013
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I should have created a first-date questionnaire heartaches ago.
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218640
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Mrs. Bigelow loaned Tessa a black tulle maid’s uniform and helped her pin it in at the sides. She tied on Tessa the stiff white apron. Slippery, pale, opaque stockings of real silk oozed through the girl’s fingers, secured by a heavy satin garter belt
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21852317
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In the 15 years that I've worked at my local public library, I've learned that we librarians do plenty of things for our patrons that aren't in our job descriptions. After a patron asked me to change her flat tire, and another wanted to check out our pencil sharpener,…
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21831812
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She looked up, blinked. Fuck are you? I shook my head. Nobody you’ll remember, I said.
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21833617
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Eat slowly. Wait. Do not bring reading material. Do not bring headphones. Avoid distractions.
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2180106
|
My brother and I had often debated whether we could get our father to shave his moustache off, just to see if his sophistication remained intact without it.
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217831
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Lying there, with the terrible screech emanating from his chest, blaring from his open mouth, he thinks about jet planes and jack hammers and nuclear explosions. He doesn't have quiet thoughts.
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217800
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Early reviews of Barney’s Version (the film) had prepared me for finding the book’s most amusing attributes – particularly its skewering of Quebec nationalist politics and Canadian cultural nationalism – left out. After all, turning a 417-page account of
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217752
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He had been the innocent stooge for a young girl's selfish dreams. He vowed to be more careful. He would rather be lonely, if need be, than compromise himself with girls like that.
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217664
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Les petites collines de ma cousine Vous savez, ma mère a eu peur du fait que je ne résiste plus. Elle avait mille fois raison : Mes quatre sœurs ont toutes rendu l'âme avant que…
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21752521
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“Your sister is a slut,” said Ma to me over supper.
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21751911
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My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don't want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin's death and Peter the Great (6'7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in…
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217221
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The following day, I was so nervous that I decided to have a drink to keep a lid on my nerves. It wasn't even noon yet. They say that's when you know it's getting bad, and that drinking has become a problem. But I hadn't gone out with anyone in over fi
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216954
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It rained on the morning of the party, and the weatherman promised it would continue throughout the day. But Marilyn didn't mind. She actually preferred entertaining in bad weather. Her rugs weren't valuable enough to worry about, and the gloomier the sky
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216811
|
I saw your soul like flesh through négligée,
enigma moulding treasure from okay.
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216754
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Novelist E.M. Forster said of Auden "Because he once wrote 'We must love one another or die' he can command me to follow him."
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