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Certain Kinds Of Things That The Novel Used To Do, Which Was, "oh, I'm Living Out Here In West Nowhere, Nebraska And I'm Curious How The Upper Class In New York City Lives, I Guess I'll Read A Novel About It." We Don't Have To Do That Now. You Just Turn On The Tv. Turn On Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You Can Get That Information Anywhere. Novels Don't Have To Do That Anymore.

-Jonathan Franzen

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Certain Kinds Of Things

Jonathan Franzen

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Certain Kinds Of Things That The Novel Used To Do, Which Was, "oh, I'm Living Out Here In West Nowhere, Nebraska And I'm Curious How The Upper Class In New York City Lives, I Guess I'll Read A Novel About It." We Don't Have To Do That Now. You Just Turn On The Tv. Turn On Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You Can Get That Information Anywhere. Novels Don't Have To Do That Anymore.

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When I Was Younger, The Main Struggle Was To Be A 'good Writer.' Now I More Or Less Take My Writing Abilities For Granted, Although This Doesn't Mean I Always Write Well.

The Pain Was Quite Extraordinary. And Yet Also Weirdly Welcome And Restorative, Bringing Him News Of His Aliveness And His Caughtness In A Story Larger Than Himself.

Nothing Got Inside The Head Without Becoming Pictures.

This Evening I Begin A Notebook. If Anyone Reads This, I Trust They Will Forgive My Overuse Of "i". I Can't Stop It. I'm Writing This.

Seriously, The World Is Changing So Quickly That If You Had Any More Than 80 Years Of Change I Don't See How You Could Stand It Psychologically.

Deploring Other People--their Lack Of Perfection--had Always Been Our Sport.

If You're Interested In How People Behave, If You're Interested In The Way They Talk About Themselves, The Way The Conceive Of Themselves, It's Very Hard To Ignore Drugs Nowadays, Because That Is So Much Part Of The Conversation.

I Find It A Huge Strain To Be Responsible For My Tastes And Be Known And Defined By Them.

If You Want To Have Friends, You Have To Remember That Nobody's Perfect.

He Had A Happy Canine Way Of Seeking Approval Without Seeming Insecure.

The Reader Is A Friend, Not An Adversary, Not A Spectator.

And When The Event, The Big Change In Your Life, Is Simply An Insight-- Isn't That A Strange Thing? That Absolutely Nothing Changes Except That You See Things Differently And You're Less Fearful And Less Anxious And Generally Stronger As A Result: Isn't It Amazing That A Completely Invisible Thing In Your Head Can Feel Realer Than Anything You've Experienced Before?

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.

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.

What You Discovered About Yourself In Raising Children Wasn't Always Agreeable Or Attractive.

Popularity Has Become Its Own Justification.

It Seems To Me Self-evident That If You Have A Life, Things Happen In It, And Certain Things Do Change; Certain Things End. People You Know Die.

I Used To Think It Was Hard To Write, And I Still Find The Process More Or Less Unpleasant, But If I Know What I'm Doing It Rattles Along, Then The Rewrite Whips It Into Shape Rather Quickly.

He Wanted This Someone To See How Much He Hurt.

But As Far As Being Popular, Yeah, I Think Dave Barry Is Really Funny.

Sounded To Me Like He Had A Pretty Good Idea What He Was Saying," Van Replied, With Surprisingly Little Anger. "it's A Pity He Had To Overintellectualize Like That. He Did Such Good Work, And Then He Had To Go And Intellectualize It.

I'd Be Surprised If Non-fiction Writers Hate To Be Interviewed. We All Hate Them, Because There's Really Nothing To Say Except "read The Book." Right? At Least With Non-fiction, You Can Kind Of Convey Some Information, And People Can Decide For Themselves Whether They Want More Of That Kind Of Information. But With A Novel, What Am I Going To Do?

The Writer’s Life Is A Life Of Revisions.

I Was About 13, In Some Ways, When I Wrote The First Book. Approximately 18 When I Wrote The Second.

It Was A Way Of Recognizing Places Of Enchantment: People Falling Asleep Like This.

Elective Ignorance Was A Great Survival Skill, Perhaps The Greatest.

Survival Skills

We May Freak Out Globally, But We Suffer Locally.

The Personality Susceptible To The Dream Of Limitless Freedom Is A Personality Also Prone, Should The Dream Ever Sour, To Misanthropy And Rage.

The Place Of Stillness That You Have To Go To To Write, But Also To Read Seriously, Is The Point Where You Can Actually Make Responsible Decisions, Where You Can Actually Engage Productively With An Otherwise Scary And Unmanageable World.

[t]o Love A Specific Person, And To Identify With His Or Her Struggles And Joys As If They Were Your Own, You Have To Surrender Some Of Your Self.

You Encountered A Misery Near The End Of The Day And It Took A While To Gauge Its Full Extent. Some Miseries Had Sharp Curvature And Could Be Negotiated Readily. Others Had Almost No Curvature And You Knew You'd Be Spending Hours Turning The Corner. Great Whopping-big Planet-sized Miseries.

The End Of The Day

Here Was A Torture That Greek Inventors Of The Feast And The Stone Had Omitted From Their Hades: The Blanket Of Self-deception. A Lovely Warm Blanket As Far As It Covered The Soul In Torment, But It Never Quite Covered Everything.

Twitter Is Unspeakably Irritating. Twitter Stands For Everything I Oppose.

Once There Are Good Sentences On The Page, I Can Feel A Loyalty To Them And Start Following Their Logic, And Take Refuge From Myself.

Fiction That Isn't An Author's Personal Adventure Into The Frightening Or The Unknown Isn't Worth Writing For Anything But Money.

The Correction, When It Finally Came, Was Not An Overnight Bursting Of A Bubble But A Much More Gentle Letdown, A Year-long Leakage Of Value From Key Financial Markets, A Contraction Too Gradual To Generate Headlines And Too Predictable To Seriously Hurt Anybody But Fools And The Working Poor.

The Reason This System Can’t Be Overthrown In This Country,” Walter Said, “is All About Freedom. The Reason The Free Market In Europe Is Tempered By Socialism Is That They’re Not So Hung Up On Personal Liberties There. They Also Have Lower Population Growth Rates, Despite Comparable Income Levels. The Europans Are All-around More Rational, Basically. And The Conversation About Rights In This Country Isn’t Rational. It’s Taking Place On The Level Of Emotion, And Class Resentments, Which Is Why The Right Is So Good At Exploiting It.

This Wasn't The Person He'd Thought He Was, Or Would Have Chosen To Be If He'd Been Free To Choose, But There Was Something Comforting And Liberating About Being An Actual Definite Someone, Rather Than A Collection Of Contradictory Potential Someones.

To Me, The Point Of A Novel Is To Take You To A Still Place. You Can Multitask With A Lot Of Things, But You Can’t Really Multitask Reading A Book.

But Nothing Disturbs The Feeling Of Specialness Like The Presence Of Other Human Beings Feeling Identically Special.

He Became Another Data Point In The American Experiment Of Self-government, An Experiment Statistically Skewed From The Outset, Because It Wasn't The People With Sociable Genes Who Fled The Crowded Old World For The New Continent; It Was The People Who Didn't Get Along Well With Others.

Good Novels Are Produced By People Who Voluntarily Isolate Themselves And Go Deep, And Report From The Depths On What They Find.

The World Was Ending Then, It's Ending Still, And I'm Happy To Belong To It Again.

Without Privacy There Was No Point In Being An Individual.

Just As The Camera Draws A Stake Through The Heart Of Serious Portraiture, Television Has Killed The Novel Of Social Reportage.

I Don't Personally Like The E-readers They've Come Up With So Far. I Don't Fetishize Books, But I Do Like That They're Solid And Unchanging.

It Offended His Sense Of Himself, Because He Was An Individual From An Age Of Individuals, And A String Of Lights Was, Like Him, An Individual Thing. No Matter How Little The Thing Had Cost, To Throw It Away Was To Deny Its Value.

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You See More Sitting Still Than Chasing After.

I Look At My Father, Who Was In Many Ways An Unhappy Person, But Who, Not Long Before He Got Sick, Said That The Greatest Source Of Satisfaction In His Life Had Been Going To Work In The Company Of Other Workers.

Readers And Writers Are United In Their Need For Solitude, In Their Pursuit Of Substance In A Time Of Ever-increasing Evanescence: In Their Reach Inward, Via Print, For A Way Out Of Loneliness.

It Took Hours To Turn The Clock Back 30 Seconds.

I Feel As If I'm Clearly Part Of A Trend Among Writers Who Take Themselves Seriously - And I Confess To Taking Myself As Seriously As The Next Writer.

So, What, You Got Cigarette Burns, Too?" Gitanes Said. Chip Showed His Palm, "it's Nothing." "self-inflicted. You Pathetic American." "different Kind Of Prison" Chip Said.

He Couldn't Figure Out If She Was Immensely Well Adjusted Or Seriously Messed Up.

Nell Zink Is A Writer Of Extraordinary Talent And Range. Her Work Insistently Raises The Possibility That The World Is Larger And Stranger Than The World You Think You Know.

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How Could I Have Thought That I Needed To Cure Myself In Order To Fit Into The 'real' World? I Didn't Need Curing, And The World Didn't, Either; The Only Thing That Did Need Curing Was My Understanding Of My Place In It. Without That Understanding - Without A Sense Of Belonging To The Real World - It Was Impossible To Thrive In An Imagined One.

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Remind Me Again What's Wrong With Dave Matthews?" "basically Everything, Except Technical Proficiency," Walter Said. "right." "but Maybe Especially The Banality Of The Lyrics. 'gotta Be Free, So Free, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Can't Live Without My Freedom, Yeah Yeah.' That's Pretty Much Every Song.

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I Hate That Word Dysfunction.

Birds Were Like Dinosaurs' Better Selves. They Had Short Lives And Long Summers. We All Should Be So Lucky As To Leave Behind Such Heirs.

I Feel That Working Environmentalists Are, In The Main, Happier Than Armchair Environmentalists.

Environmentalist

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.

You're Either Reading A Book Or You're Not.

I Voluntarily Inflicted A Certain Level Of Insanity On Myself.

The Problem Was Money And The Indignities Of Life Without It. Every Stroller, Cell Phone, Yankees Cap, And Suv He Saw Was A Torment. He Wasn't Covetous, He Wasn't Envious. But Without Money He Was Hardly A Man.

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What He'd Never Understood About Men In His Position, In All The Books He'd Read And Movies He'd Seen About Them, Was Clearer To Him Now: You Couldn't Keep Expecting Wholehearted Love Without, At Some Point, Requiting It. There Was No Credit To Be Earned For Simply Being Good.

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Fiction, I Believed, Was The Transmutation Of Experiential Dross Into Linguistic Gold. Fiction Meant Taking Up Whatever The World Had Abandoned By The Road And Making Something Beautiful Out Of It.

Our Lives Look A Lot More Interesting When They’re Filtered Through The Sexy Facebook Interface. We Star In Our Own Movies, We Photograph Ourselves Incessantly, We Click The Mouse And A Machine Confirms Our Sense Of Mastery.

If Multiculturalism Succeeds In Making Us A Nation Of Independently Empowered Tribes, Each Tribe Will Be Deprived Of The Comfort Of Victimhood And Be Forced To Confront Human Limitation For What It Is: A Fixture Of Life.

He Watched A Catbird Hopping Around In An Azalea That Was Readying Itself To Bloom; He Envied The Bird For Knowing Nothing Of What He Knew; He Would Have Swapped Souls With It In A Heartbeat. And Then To Take Wing, To Know The Air's Buoyancy Even For An Hour: The Trad Was A No-brainer, And The Catbird, With Its Lively Indifference To Him, Its Sureness Of Physical Selfhood, Seemed Well Aware Of How Preferable It Was To Be The Bird.

Knowing Nothing

The Most Purely Autobiographical fiction Requires Pure Invention. Nobody Ever Wrote A More Autobiographical Story Than "the Metamorphosis".

There's A Hazardous Sadness To The First Sounds Of Someone Else's Work In The Morning; It's As If Stillness Experiences Pain In Being Broken.

The Human Species Was Given Dominion Over The Earth And Took The Opportunity To Exterminate Other Species And Warm The Atmosphere And Generally Ruin Things In Its Own Image, But It Paid This Price For Its Privileges: That The Finite And Specific Animal Body Of This Species Contained A Brain Capable Of Conceiving The Infinite And Wishing To Be Infinite Itself.

It's Very Liberating For Me To Realize That I Don't Have To Step Up To The Plate With A Plot That Involves The U.n. Security Council.

It'sthe Fate Of Most Ping-pong Tables In Home Basements Eventually To Serve The Ends Of Other, More Desperate Games.

Each New Thing He Encountered In Life Impelled Him In A Direction That Fully Convinced Him Of Its Rightness, But Then The Next New Thing Loomed Up And Impelled Him In The Opposite Direction, Which Also Felt Right. There Was No Controlling Narrative: He Seemed To Himself A Purely Reactive Pinball In A Game Whose Only Object Was To Stay Alive For Staying Alive's Sake.

She Wondered: How Could People Respond To These Images If Images Didn't Secretly Enjoy The Same Status As Real Things? Not That Images Were So Powerful, But That The World Was So Weak. It Could Be Read, Certainly, In Its Weakness, As On Days When The Sun Baked Fallen Apples In Orchards And The Valley Smelled Like Cider, And Cold Nights When Jordan Had Driven Chadds Ford For Dinner And The Tires Of Her Chevrolet Had Crunched On The Gravel Driveway; But The World Was Fungible Only As Images. Nothing Got Inside The Head Without Becoming Pictures.

It's Just A Matter Of Writing The Kind Of Book I Enjoy Reading. Something Better Be Happening At The Beginning, And Then On Every Page After, Or I Get Irritated.

Use Well Thy Freedom.

I Think We Live In An Era Of Problems That, If You Step Back And Look At Them Globally, Can't Be Solved. One Response To That Is, "oh Well, It's All Hopeless. The Natural World Is Getting Wrecked, Birds Are Disappearing, The Planet Is Warming And So Anything We Might Do On A Smaller Scale Is Meaningless."

But The First Lesson Reading Teaches Is How To Be Alone.

Certain Kinds Of Things That The Novel Used To Do, Which Was, "oh, I'm Living Out Here In West Nowhere, Nebraska And I'm Curious How The Upper Class In New York City Lives, I Guess I'll Read A Novel About It." We Don't Have To Do That Now. You Just Turn On The Tv. Turn On Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You Can Get That Information Anywhere. Novels Don't Have To Do That Anymore.

And Meanwhile The Sad Truth Was That Not Everyone Could Be Extraordinary, Not Everyone Could Be Extremely Cool; Because Whom Would This Leave To Be Ordinary?

Walter Had Never Liked Cats. They'd Seemed To Him The Sociopaths Of The Pet World, A Species Domesticated As An Evil Necessary For The Control Of Rodents And Subsequently Fetishized The Way Unhappy Countries Fetishize Their Militaries, Saluting The Uniforms Of Killers As Cat Owners Stroke Their Animals' Lovely Fur And Forgive Their Claws And Fangs. He'd Never Seen Anything In A Cat's Face But Simpering Incuriosity And Self-interest; You Only Had To Tease One With A Mouse-toy To See Where It's True Heart Lay...cats Were All About Using People

Depression Presents Itself As A Realism Regarding The Rottenness Of The World In General And The Rottenness Of Your Life In Particular.

I Guess My Life Hasn’t Always Been Happy, Or Easy, Or Exactly What I Want. At A Certain Point, I Just Have To Try Not To Think Too Much About Certain Things, Or Else They’ll Break My Heart.

But She Was Seventeen Now And Not Actually Dumb. 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.

I Was A Late Child From My Parents, So I Grew Up Surrounded By People A Lot Older Than Me. I Think Even When I Was 21, I Felt Like I Was A 70-year-old Man.

Mr. Franzen Said He And Mr. Wallace, Over Years Of Letters And Conversations About The Ethical Role Of The Novelist, Had Come To The Joint Conclusion That The Purpose Of Writing Fiction Was “a Way Out Of Loneliness.” (ny Times Article On The Memorial Service Of David Foster Wallace.)

Nice People Don't Necessarily Fall In Love With Nice People.

Falling In Love

If You Look At The New Testament, It's A Gospel Of Love. Yes, There's Talk Of Judgement And There's Talk Of Heaven And There's Talk Of People Not Getting Into Heaven, But It Doesn't Seem To Me That The Fundamental Message Of The Gospels Was One Of Guilt And Retribution So Much As Love.

I Admire Your Capacity For Admiring.

I Think The Mission For The Writer Is To Tell Stories In A Compelling Way About The Stuff That Cannot Be Talked About, That Cannot Be Gotten At With Shallow Media.

The Figure Of My Father Looms Large In My Imagination.

Patty Knew, In Her Heart, That He Was Wrong In His Impression Of Her. And The Mistake She Went To Go On To Make, The Really Big Life Mistake, Was To Go Along With Walter's Version Of Her In Spite Of Knowing That It Wasn't Right. He Seemed So Certain Of Her Goodness That Eventually He Wore Her Down.

When You Stay In Your Room And Rage Or Sneer Or Shrug Your Shoulders, As I Did For Many Years, The World And Its Problems Are Impossibly Daunting. But When You Go Out And Put Yourself In Real Relation To Real People, Or Even Just Real Animals, There’s A Very Real Danger That You Might End Up Loving Some Of Them. And Who Knows What Might Happen To You Then?

Depression, When It's Clinical, Is Not A Metaphor. It Runs In Families, And It's Known To Respond To Medication And To Counseling. However Truly You Believe There's A Sickness To Existence That Can Never Be Cured, If You're Depressed You Will Sooner Or Later Surrender And Say: I Just Don't Want To Feel Bad Anymore. The Shift From Depressive Realism To Tragic Realism, From Being Immobilized By Darkness To Being Sustained By It, Thus Strangely Seems To Require Believing In The Possibility Of A Cure.

As With All Forms Of Liberation, Of Which The Liberation Of Women Is Only One Example, It Is Easy To Suppose In A Time Of Freedom That The Darker Days Of Repression Can Never Come Again.

It's Healthy To Say Uncle When Your Bone's About To Break.

Family's The One Thing You Can't Change. You Can Cover Yourself With Tattoos. You Can Get A Grapefruit-sized Ring Going Through Your Earlobe. You Can Change Your Name. You Can Move To A Different Continent. But You Cannot Change Who Your Parents Were, And Who Your Siblings Are, And Who Your Children Are.

There Is, After All, A Kind Of Happiness In Unhappiness, If It's The Right Unhappiness.

Fiction Is A Solution, The Best Solution, To The Problem Of Existential Solitude.

Every Good Writer I Know Needs To Go Into Some Deep, Quiet Place To Do Work That Is Fully Imagined. And What The Internet Brings Is Lots Of Vulgar Data. It Is The Antithesis Of The Imagination. It Leaves Nothing To The Imagination.

I Wrote Two Plotted Books, Got Some Of The Fundamentals Of Storytelling Down, Then... It's Sort Of Like Taking The Training Wheels Off, Trying To Write A Book That's Fun In The Same Way Without Relying On Quite Such Mechanical Or External Beats.

The Novelist Has More And More To Say To Readers Who Have Less And Less Time To Read: Where To Find The Energy To Engage A Culture In Crisis When The Crisis Consists In The Impossibility Of Engaging With The Culture?

She Was So Much A Personality And So Little Anything Else That Even Staring Straight At Her He Had No Idea What She Really Looked Like.

I Can't Stomach Any Kind Of Notion That Serious Fiction Is Good For Us, Because I Don't Believe That Everything That's Wrong With The World Has A Cure.

Interesting Verbs Are Seldom Very Interesting.

The More You Pursue Distractions, The Less Effective Any Particular Distraction Is, And So I'd Had To Up Various Dosages, Until, Before I Knew It, I Was Checking My E-mail Every Ten Minutes, And My Plugs Of Tobacco Were Getting Ever Larger, And My Two Drinks A Night Had Worsened To Four, And I'd Achieved Such Deep Mastery Of Computer Solitaire That My Goal Was No Longer To Win A Game But To Win Two Or More Games In A Row--a Kind Of Meta-solitaire Whose Fascination Consisted Not In Playing The Cards But In Surfing The Streaks Of Wins And Losses.

The Mekons Were Kind Of Like The Background Music Of My Life.

Background Music

Everything He Did Was At Least Partial And Often Total Bullshit” (402).

Integrity's A Neutral Value. Hyenas Have Integrity, Too. They're Pure Hyena.

Today's Baudelaires Are Hip-hop Artists.

How Wrong To Have Been So Negative, How Wrong To Have Been So Gloomy, How Wrong To Have Run Away From Life, How Wrong To Have Said No, Again And Again, Instead Of Yes.

His Tiredness Hurt So Much It Kept Him Awake.

Everything He'd Done With Regard To Her In The Last Three Years Had Been Calculated To Foreclose The Intensely Personal Sort Of Talks They'd Had When He Was Younger: To Get Her To Shut Up, To Train Her To Contain Herself, To Make Her Stop Pestering Him With Her Overfull Heart And Her Uncensored Self. And Now That The Training Was Complete And She Was Obediently Trivial With Him, He Felt Bereft Of Her And Wanted To Undo It.

If You Read The Biographies Of People Who Have Written Good Books, You Often See The Point Where They Suddenly Come Into Themselves, And Those Weeks In The Spring Of 1997 Were When I Came Into Myself As A Writer. They Feel Like Some Of The Best Weeks Of Writing I’ll Ever Have. The Discovery That I Could Write Better About Something As Trivial As An Ordinary Family Dinner Than I Could About The Exploding Prison Population Of The United States, And The Corporatization Of American Life, And All The Other Things I’d Been Trying To Do, Was A Real Revelation.

Brooklyn Was Like Philadelphia Made Better By Its Proximity To Manhattan.

Since Our Technology Is Really Just An Extension Of Ourselves, We Don’t Have To Have Contempt For Its Manipulability In The Way We Might With Actual People. It’s All One Big Endless Loop. We Like The Mirror And The Mirror Likes Us. To Friend A Person Is Merely To Include The Person In Our Private Hall Of Flattering Mirrors.

Robin Turned And Looked Straight Into Her. "what's Life For?" "i Don't Know." "i Don't Either. But I Don't Think It's About Winning.

The Problem With Making A Virtual World Of Oneself Is Akin To The Problem With Projecting Ourselves Onto A Cyberworld: There’s No End Of Virtual Spaces In Which To Seek Stimulation, But Their Very Endlessness, The Perpetual Stimulation Without Satisfaction, Becomes Imprisoning.

Being Dead's Only A Problem If You Know You're Dead, Which You Never Do Because You're Dead!

...she Felt That Nothing Could Kill Her Hope Now, Nothing. She Was Seventy-five And She Was Going To Make Some Changes In Her Life.

I'm Not Too Concerned What Happens To My Books After I'm Dead. But I Am Very Concerned By What's Going On With The Culture Of Reading And Writing Nowadays.

It's Not Surprising To See In My Own Work, Looking Back, And In The Work Of Some Of My Peers, An Attention To Family. It's Nice To Write A Book That Does Tend Toward Significance And Meaning, And Where Else Are You Sure Of Finding It?

I Wanted All Of Her And Resented Other Boys For Wanting Any Part Of Her.

He And His Wife Loved Each Other And Brought Each Other Daily Pain. Everything Else He Was Doing In His Life, Even His Longing For Lalitha, Amounted To Little More Than Flight From Circumstance. He And Patty Couldn't Live Together And Couldn't Imagine Living Apart. Each Time He Thought They'd Reached The Unbearable Breaking Point, It Turned Out That There Was Still Further They Could Go Without Breaking.

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