2166 13 3
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We lived in a Holiday Inn trying not to be depressed that life had turned out to be so much like Eastenders, trying not to acknowledge that the thrill we’d got out of each other was the thrill of giving in to the wrong thing. We had more sex than ever b
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135041
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You gather their faces in the palms of your hands and their purple eyes blink, blink, unseeing.
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1932145
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And on nights like those I conjure Martha's childhood, a little girl who could make the whole world fall in love with her, with those goddam big seashell eyes, enticing adults to fall into a blue-green sea that never ends, never promises survival.
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126020
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Lu loved his mother, but her anxieties nagged at him like poison ivy. You can't avoid scratching it, but the more you do, the worse it gets.
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139084
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The Houston police devised a punishment for the adulterous thespian that would not hurt the nights or household income of his French young wife.
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136500
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One minute Rudy was sitting up close to me, asking me how could Geppetto make a little boy out of a piece of wood, and the next, Steve was pounding up the stairs, yelling, "Carla, get blankets, warm clothes; we're leaving, we won't be back."
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24944012
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The memory of thinking
in some other language
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2039125
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We left Louisville two weeks after daddy died...
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173751
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One year, she got a kite.
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179753
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The summer everyone read Faulkner, I read Hemingway. Out of spite.
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96730
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“Hello, I’m Marlene, and this is April,” says the older of two women. Both Marlene and April wear ankle length dresses. The name Hester Prynne flashes through my mind.
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111720
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I find that I am keeping silent more often. I don't like repeating myself.
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204651
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I’ve never liked birds. There’s something smug about the way they look at us, we prisoners of gravity, something self-congratulatory in their songs. Maybe I’m just projecting my own feelings about being stuck on the ground, attributing attitudes t
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103000
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Can't you go faster Said the disciple to the master Won't you speed up the car I know that you're loaded And I've already goaded You into crashing through the star But we need To pick up more speed As we break past all the flames So we might soon demise In this…
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148820
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Joseph K. ran a publishing house in the shadow of the Castle.
Perhaps “publishing house” is too grand a title. Joseph K. kept a battery of six or seven (depending on repairs) manual typewriters, a crate of carbon paper, and a large stapling machine
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1969124
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Shadows skipped across the bedroom wall at 80 km/hour. It wouldn't be so bad if people wouldn't use their high beams but it's the price you pay for living on a dark highway with low property taxes. “How do you sleep in here?”…
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138540
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The way each intersection in a city where you’ve lived a while becomes layered with personal archeology.
The cafe that replaced a liquor store you avoided, and the friend (or lover) you broke up with there,
and the way on the day of the big fire you
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150660
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The two walked around, taking in all the classics: the imported Russian matryoshka dolls of varying styles and bright colors; spinning tops, red Radio Flyer wagons, kaleidoscopes, and wooden yo-yo's invoked memories of Christmases past. The hand-stitched
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126460
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To be perfectly honest, I was lousy at my job. Or at least most aspects of it. The typing wasn’t a problem: I can get up to a hundred words a minute on a good stretch of unbroken text, and I’m pretty accurate. I even edited as I went, fixing passiv
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162555
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If there is an airport, it is one of dreams. If there is a dream, it is one of shadows. If there are shadows, there is not much more but the thoughts of a short man meeting a short woman on a runway of forbidden desires, in a foreign city belonging to n
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23072113
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“What sort of truck was it in Texas?” Carlisle says.
“Small as truck goes,” Mill says. “Smaller than a full-size pick-up.”
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152530
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His mouth went dry, but he managed to say, coolly, “Just how would you like me to do that, Sandra?”
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175582
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Four in the morning. I was awake because I'm always awake. There were little fog-halos around the streetlights.
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121581
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Buck, naked, has no words. The best he can manage is a dopey strangulated cough. His wife, who is clothed, stands before him, next to the waterbed that took Buck half a day to force into the trailer.
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153510
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Lu peeked at his cards again. They were still jacks, and they still looked mighty nice.
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87220
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So lie there like a sodden Brussel Sprout. Leave your paramour to thrash about in vain.
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1626136
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Men aren't good at these kinds of things, my mother tells me. She states it as if it is a scientific fact.
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197423
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My father's hands were huge. His left knuckles gashed as a kid when he rode his bike too close to a moving train. When his fingers fisted around a glass, the scarred joints bulged from his grip like blind eyes.
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115700
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If it was truly new territory of the mind, he thought he might find some place that resembled the world as his dad envisioned it, having already decided that his father could never turn back across the frontier to the old world of youth
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162551
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When Bill was in the hospital, one month bleeding into the next, his mother visited exactly twice, both times complaining of the things she needed or couldn’t get rid of: mop heads, bleach, dustpans, detergents, grease, turgid water in the basement. And
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