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I Am Against Censorship. I Prefer The Chaos Of Uncontrollable Communication Of All Sorts To Selective Banning Of Certain Materials. I Do Not Think Human Beings Can Be Trusted To Be Above Politics And To Promote The Common Good. One Group's Common Good Is Another Group's Evil.

-Erica Jong

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I Am Against Censorship.

Erica Jong

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I Am Against Censorship. I Prefer The Chaos Of Uncontrollable Communication Of All Sorts To Selective Banning Of Certain Materials. I Do Not Think Human Beings Can Be Trusted To Be Above Politics And To Promote The Common Good. One Group's Common Good Is Another Group's Evil.

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Women In America Read 'lifestyle' Pages Which Are Really Glorifications Of Shopping. They Teach Us We Must Veil Ourselves In Make-up To Be Loved. And We Willingly Take The Veil, Thinking Ourselves Freed By It. Make-up Is No More Optional For Us Than The Veil Is For Arab Women: It Is Our Western Version Of The Chador.

I Thought To Spend My Declining Years Writing Poetry And Teaching - But That Won't Pay The Bergdorf's Bill. I Think I'll Move To Somewhere Life Is Cheaper.

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Poetry Is The Language We Speak In The Most Terrifying Or Ecstatic Passages Of Our Lives. But The Very Word Poetry Scares People. They Think Of Their Grade School Teachers Reciting 'hiawatha' And They Groan.

Growing Up Female In America. What A Liability! You Grew Up With Your Ears Full Of Cosmetic Ads, Love Songs, Advice Columns, Whoreoscopes, Hollywood Gossip, And Moral Dilemmas On The Level Of Tv Soap Operas. What Litanies The Advertisers Of The Good Life Chanted At You! What Curious Catechisms!

I Thought Of The Nameless Inventor Of The Bathtub. I Was Somehow Sure It Was A Woman. And Was The Inventor Of The Bathtub Plug A Man?

Writers Do Not Choose Their Subjects; Their Subjects Choose Them.

Fear Is A Sign-usually A Sign That I'm Doing Something Right.

What I Discovered Was Is That It's Rare To Find A Person That You Feel Very Intimate With, And You Can Sleep With Lots Of People And Not Find What You're Looking For.

The Lives Of Great Men Are More Oft' At Variance With Their Profess'd Phillosophies Than Consistent With 'em.

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Women Are Their Own Worst Enemies. And Guilt Is The Main Weapon Of Self-torture . . . Show Me A Woman Who Doesn't Feel Guilty And I'll Show You A Man.

Men Must Be Stripped Of Arrogance And Women Must Become Independent For Any Mutually Nurturing Alliance To Endure Between The Sexes.

What I Would Like To Give My Daughter Is Freedom. And This Is Something That Must Be Given By Example, Not By Exhortation.

Pregnancy Seemed Like A Tremendous Abdication Of Control. Something Growing Inside You Which Would Eventually Usurp Your Life.

In Freeing Myself From The Romantic Dream Of Finding Another Man To Come Along And Rescue Me, I Learned That No One Can Rescue Me Except Myself.

Memory Is The Most Transient Of All Possessions. And When It Goes, It Leaves As Few Traces As Stars That Have Disappeared.

Because I Loved Myself, I Was Loved.

A Book Burrows Into Your Life In A Very Profound Way Because The Experience Of Reading Is Not Passive.

No One To Blame! That Was Why Most People Led Lives They Hated, With People They Hated. How Wonderful To Have Someone To Blame! How Wonderful To Live With One's Nemesis! You May Be Miserable, But You Feel Forever In The Right. You May Be Fragmented, But You Feel Absolved Of All The Blame For It. Take Your Life In Your Own Hands, And What Happens? A Terrible Thing: No One To Blame.

Nothing Quite Has Reality For Me Till I Write It All Down--revising And Embellishing As I Go. I'm Always Waiting For Things To Be Over So I Can Get Home And Commit Them To Paper.

People Always Think That History Proceeds In A Straight Line. It Doesn't. Social Attitudes Don't Change In A Straight Line. There's Always A Backlash Against Progressive Ideas.

The Dilemma Is That If One Does Not Risk Anything One Risks Even More.

Love Is Love, But Marriage Is An Investment.

Creativity Demands Nothing Less Than All You Have. Talent Alone Is Never Enough.

I Think Professionalism Is Important, And Professionalism Means You Get Paid.

There Is This Tendency To Think That If You Could Only Find The Magic Way, Then You Could Become A Poet. "tell Me How To Become A Poet. Tell Me What To Do." . . . What Makes You A Poet Is A Gift For Language, An Ability To See Into The Heart Of Things, And An Ability To Deal With Important Unconscious Material. When All These Things Come Together, You're A Poet. But There Isn't One Little Gimmick That Makes You A Poet. There Isn't Any Formula For It.

If You Imagine The World Listening, You'll Never Write A Line. That's Why Privacy Is So Important. You Should Write First Drafts As If They Will Never Be Shown To Anyone.

It Is For This, Partly, That I Write. How Can I Know What I Think Unless I See What I Write.

I Don't Think That Sex Necessarily Produces Intimacy.

What Is The Fatal Charm Of Italy? What Do We Find There That Can Be Found Nowhere Else? I Believe It Is A Certain Permission To Be Human, Which Other Places, Other Countries, Lost Long Ago.

We Need Poetry Most At Those Moments When Life Astounds Us With Losses, Gains, Or Celebrations. We Need It Most When We Are Most Hurt, Most Happy, Most Downcast, Most Jubilant. Poetry Is The Language We Speak In Times Of Greatest Need. And The Fact That It Is An Endangered Species In Our Culture Tells Us That We Are In Deep Trouble.

A Baby's Mother Also Needs A Mother.

Love Is Serene And Calm

There Is Simply No Dignified Way For A Woman To Live Alone. Oh, She Can Get Along Financially Perhaps (though Not Nearly As Well As A Man), But Emotionally She Is Never Left In Peace. Her Friends, Her Family, Her Fellow Workers Never Let Her Forget That Her Husbandlessness, Her Childlessness - Her Selfishness, In Short - Is A Reproach To The American Way Of Life.

All People Believe Their Suffering Is Greater Than Others.

You Reach A Point In Life Where You Realize That You Might As Well Do What You Need To Do, Because Your Being Loved Or Not Being Loved Is Really A Function Of The People You Encounter And Not Of Yourself. That Is An Immensely Liberating Insight.

It's Important To Know What You're Going To Spend Your Life On, And The Only Way You're Going To Find That Is By Connecting With The Force Inside Yourself.

Good Sex Is A Mystery. Perhaps Humping And Pumping Is Not A Mystery, But Good Sex Is A Mystery, And How Human Beings Become Truly Intimate Remains A Mystery.

Since Flesh Can't Stay, We Pass The Words Along.

I Don't Think That I Had Any Idea That 'fear Of Flying' Would Become A Part Of The Culture. I Had No Idea That It Would Go All Over The World And Be Published In Chinese And Serbo-croat And So On.

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It's Easier To Write About Pain Than About Joy. Joy Is Wordless.

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Solitude Is Un-american.

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Writing Is One Of The Few Professions Left Where You Take All The Responsibility For What You Do. It's Really Dangerous And Ultimately Destroys You As A Writer If You Start Thinking About Responses To Your Work Or What Your Audience Needs.

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If We Don't Risk Anything, We Risk Even More.

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments. It Seems To Hammer You Into The Ground. It Drives You Deeper And Deeper Into Your Own Guilt. It Makes The Voices Inside Your Head Accuse You More Viciously Than Any Outside Voices Ever Could.

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That Was Probably The Mistake Of My Generation, That We Thought That Having Sex With Anyone Would Be Intimate And It Wasn't.

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Sex Just As A Drive, As A Hormonal Drive, Is Not Very Interesting.

Very Interesting

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Home Is Where Your Books Are.

Eating Is Never So Simple As Hunger.

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Keeping A Journal Implies Hope.

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Take Your Life In Your Own Hands, And What Happens? A Terrible Thing: No One To Blame.

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Once I Worshipped Keats For Dying Young. Now I Think It's Braver To Die Old.

You Have To Enjoy Being A Woman. Why Should Being A Woman Be Such A Negative Thing Where You Always Have To Improve Yourself? I Have Never In My Entire Life Met A Man Who Didn't Want To Go To Bed With Me Because I Was Too Fat.

Language Matters Because Whoever Controls The Words Controls The Conversation, Because Whoever Controls The Conversation Controls Its Outcome, Because Whoever Frames The Debate Has Already Won It, Because Telling The Truth Has Become Harder And Harder To Achieve In An America Drowning In Orwellian Newspeak.

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Souls Have Neither Sex Nor Colour.

Murky Language Means Someone Wants To Pick Your Pocket.

I Write Lustily And Humorously. It Isn't Calculated; It's The Way I Think. I've Invented A Writing Style That Expresses Who I Am.

I Don't Know What The Definition Of Pornography Is And Nobody Else Does Either. Pornography Is Somebody Else's Erotica That You Don't Like. People Are Interested In Their Own Sexuality And They've Always Reflected It In Their Art. End Of Story.

Beware Of The Man Who Praises Women's Liberation; He Is About To Quit His Job.

The Only People Worth Writing About Are Those About Whom The Last Word Cannot Be Said.

Having Stopped Expecting Truth, We Rarely Get It.

The Hardest Part Is Believing In Yourself At The Notebook Stage. It Is Like Believing In Dreams In The Morning.

Flesh Is Merely A Lesson. We Learn It & Pass On.

My Generation Of Young Female Writers Discovered That We Could Dictate The Form And Content Of Our Own Fiction.

As Women Got Little Crumbs Of Power, Men Began To Act Paranoid - As If We'd Disabled Them Utterly. Do All Women Have To Keep Silent For Men To Speak? Do All Women Have To Be Legless For Men To Walk?

Is A Currency Worth Anything If No One Wants It? We Used To Buy Shoes In Italy. Remember?

It's Only When You're Forbidden To Talk About The Future That You Suddenly Realize How Much The Future Normally Occupies The Present.

Writers Are Always At The Edge Of The Inferno, And The Fire Is Licking At Our Toes. Luckily, This Turns Us On!

We Write Poems / As Leaves Give Oxygen - / So We Can Breathe.

But Come Back In November Or December, In February Or March, When The Fog, La Nebbia, Settles Upon The City Like A Marvelous Monster, And You Will Have Little Trouble Believing That Things Can Appear And Disappear In This Labyrinthine City, Or That Time Here Could Easily Slip In Its Sprockets And Take You, Willingly Or Unwillingly, Back.

Nothing You Write Is Ever Lost To You. At Some Other Level Your Mind Is Working On It.

Each Day That I Don't Write I Get More Fragmented.

I See The Whole Episode In My Memory As If It Were A Very Crisply Photographed Black And White Movie. Directed By Bergman Perhaps.we Are Playing Ourselves In The Movie Version. If Only We Could Escape From Always Having To Play Ourselves !

Black And White

I Never Became A Writer For The Money. I Am A Poet First. Even Getting Published Is A Miracle For Poets.

I Understand That Unless You Have A Government Of Laws, Rather Than A Government Of People, You Cannot Protect Dissent. And I Understand, As A Woman Who Probably Would Have Been Burned In The Marketplace For Witchcraft Only About 200 Years Ago, That I Need The First Amendment More Than Anybody Does. And That Even If I Am Repelled By Child Pornography Or Bob Guccione's Productions, That I Have To Protect Those Things, Because Essentially It's In My Self-interest To Do So.

Life Has No Plot. It Is By Far More Interesting Than Anything You Can Say About It.

The Sexuality Doesn't End. It Really Doesn't. You're Sexual Your Whole Life, If You're A Sexual Person.

Humor Is One Of The Most Serious Tools We Have For Dealing With Impossible Situations.

Impossible Situations

Venice Is Ever The Fragile Labyrinth At The Edge Of The Sea And It Reminds Us How Brief And Perilous The Journeys Of Our Lives Are; Perhaps That Is Why We Love It So. City Of Plagues And Brief Liaisons, City Of Lingering Deaths And Incendiary Loves, City Of Chimeras, Nightmares, Pigeons, Bells. You Are The Only City In The World Whose Dialect Has A Word For The Shimmer Of Canal Water Reflected On The Ceiling Of A Room.

Photographs Are The Most Curious Indicators Of Reality.

In A World Where Women Work Three Times As Hard For Half As Much, Our Achievement Has Been Denigrated, Both Marriage And Divorce Have Turned Against Us, Our Motherhood Has Been Used As An Obstacle To Our Success, Our Passion As A Trap, Our Empathy For Others As An Excuse To Underpay Us.

The Unconscious Of An Artist Is Her Greatest Treasure. It Is What Transmutes The Dross Of Autobiography Into The Gold Of Myth.

Greatest Treasure

Someday Every Woman Will Have Orgasms- Like Every Family Has Color Tv- And We Can All Get On With The Business Of Life.

It Is The Nature Of Those Books We Call Classics To Wait Patiently On The Shelf For Us To Grow Into Them.

You Are Always Naked When You Start Writing; You Are Always As If You Had Never Written Anything Before; You Are Always A Beginner. Shakespeare Wrote Without Knowing He Would Become Shakespeare

Why Does Life Need Evidence Of Life?

I've Become More Conservative About Sex As I've Gotten Older.

Every Country Gets The Circus It Deserves. Spain Gets Bullfights. Italy The Church. America Hollywood.

There Is Nothing Fiercer Than A Failed Artist. The Energy Remains, But, Having No Outlet, It Implodes In A Great Black Fart Of Rage Which Smokes Up All The Inner Windows Of The Soul. Horrible As Successful Artists Often Are, There Is Nothing Crueler Or More Vain Than A Failed Artist.

I've Kept Journals At Many Times In My Life Starting From When I Was About 13 Or 14. But It's Boring And Contrived To Keep A Journal Every Day. Better To Write As The Mood Strikes.

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments.

We Are Finally Driven To Monogamy Not By Morality But By Exhaustion.

I Don't Cook. My Mother Didn't Cook. My Daughter Doesn't Cook.

Memory Is The Crux Of Our Humanity. Without Memory We Have No Identities. That Is Really Why I Am Committing An Autobiography.

Singularity Shows Something Wrong In The Mind.

Poetry Is The Inner Life Of A Culture, Its Nervous System, Its Deepest Way Of Imagining The World. A Culture That Ignores Its Poets, Chokes Off Its Nervous System And Becomes Mortally Ill.

We Find Our Calling Or It Finds Us, And It's A Sin Against The Fates Not To Use Your Talent When You Have It.

It Is Not Unusual To Hate Great Writers Before We Learn To Love Them. Because They Have Created Something That Did Not Yet Exist, They Must Also Create Their Audience. Sometimes The Audience Is Not Yet Ready. Sometimes It Has Yet To Be Born.

The Older We Get, The More Jewish We Become In My Family.

Poetry Is Fired By Love.

Underneath It All, You Longed To Be Annihilated By Love.

As A Past President Of The Writers Guild, I Think Women Shouldn't Write For Free. Maybe You Have To Do It For A Time, To Make A Reputation, But I Think The Idea Of Giving Your Work Away Is The Beginning Of Authors Not Being Able To Make A Living.

I Went For Years Not Finishing Anything. Because, Of Course, When You Finish Something You Can Be Judged...i Had Poems Which Were Re-written So Many Times I Suspect It Was Just A Way Of Avoiding Sending Them Out.

Young People Never Believe In The Possibility Of Their Own Deaths. That's One Reason Old Men Can Send Them To War.

Men And Women, Women And Men. It Will Never Work.

Everyone Has Talent. What Is Rare Is The Courage To Follow The Talent To The Dark Place Where It Leads.

Many People Today Believe That Cynicism Requires Courage. Actually, Cynicism Is The Height Of Cowardice. It Is Innocence And Open-heartednes S That Requires The True Courage -- However Often We Are Hurt As A Result Of It.

Each One An Antidote To The One That Went Before. Each One A Reaction, An About-face, A Rebound.

If You Don't Have Time To Do It Right You Must Have Time To Do It Right You Must Have Time To Do It Over. If You Don't Know Where You Are Going, How Do You Know When You Get There? If You Don't Risk Anything, You Risk Even More.

I Know Some Good Marriages-marriages Where Both People Are Just Trying To Get Through Their Days By Helping Each Other, Being Good To Each Other.

I'm Interested In What Happens To People When They Get Into That Publicity Machine. We Tend To Think Things Have Changed, But There's Still A Deep Sexism Underlying The Way Women Are Treated Publicly.

It's Useful To Know How Much Society's Holding You Back. My Mother Would Talk About How She Was Told By The Head Of Her Art School That She Was The Best Painter, But That She Wouldn't Get The Biggest Prize Because She Would Waste Her Talent By Having Children. I Think We Have To Get Honest With Girls About How They Can Expect The World To Block Them, And We Have To Prepare Girls, And Ourselves, To Break Through Those Blocks.

Without The Gods, How Would I Sing?' I Asked. With Your Own Voice,' He Said.

Where Is Hollywood Located? Chiefly Between The Ears. In That Part Of The American Brain Lately Vacated By God.

My Generation Was Not Only Maligned In Book Reviews And Attacked In Graduate School But We Lived To See Our Adored And Adorable Daughters Wonder Why Feminism Had Become A Dirty Word.

When I'm Sitting At The Desk Not Being Able To Write Line One, It's Silence And Despair! It's Not So Easy To Put The Pen To The Legal Pad Or Type The First Sentence On The Computer Screen.

... What Is Great Poetry, After All, But The Continuation Of The Human Voice After Death?

I Think I've Become More Cynical About Sex. Meaning, I Don't Think Sex In And Of Itself Leads To An Epiphany.

If There's Anything The World Disdains More Than Uppity Young Women, It's Uppity Old Women. Dying Young Has Always Been A Woman's Best Career Move.

Ambivalence Is A Wonderful Tune To Dance To. It Has A Rhythm All Its Own.

I Believe That Women Should Live For Love, For Motherhood And For Intellect, And I Believe We Shouldn't Have To Choose. And I Believe That's Always Been Difficult For Women, To Express Themselves Intellectually, Maternally, And Passionately.

Hate Generalizes; Love Is Particular.

We Write As If Our Lives Depended Upon It. They Do.

My Advice To You Is Get Married: If You Find A Good Wife You'll Be Happy; If Not, You'll Become A Philosopher." - Socrates (470-399 B.c.) "advice Is What We Ask For When We Already Know The Answer But Wish We Didn't

Unhappiness Is Our Element. We Come To Believe We Can't Function Without It.

The Camera Creates A Magical Transformation. It's Not Enough To Exist; We Must Chronicle That Existence. ... Narrative- And Image-making Creatures Like Humans Don't Feel Any Experience Is Complete Unless It's Recorded.

Of All The Foolish Fears Of Humankind, Fear Of The Future Is By Far The Most Foolish.

It's Horrible Getting Older. I Mean, It's Wonderful Because You See The Circles Of Life Get Completed. But It's Horrible Losing Your Looks.

You Don't Get To Choose What You Get Famous For And You Don't Get To Control Which Of Your Life's Many Struggles Gets To Stand For You.

It Took Me Years To Learn To Sit At My Desk For More Than Two Minutes At A Time, To Put Up With The Solitude And The Terror Of Failure, And The Godawful Silence And The White Paper.

We All Have Fantasies About Sex That Are More Perfect Than Anything In Reality.

Though My Friends Envied Me Because I Always Seemed So Cheerful And Confident, I Was Secretly Terrified Of Practically Everything.

Anger Is Really Disappointed Hope.

I Knew I Was In England By The Smell.

The Worst Thing About Jealousy Is How Low It Makes You Reach.

The Trick Is Not How Much Pain You Feel--but How Much Joy You Feel. Any Idiot Can Feel Pain. Life Is Full Of Excuses To Feel Pain, Excuses Not To Live, Excuses, Excuses, Excuses.

The Trick Is Not How Much Pain You Feel - But How Much Joy You Feel

To Name Oneself Is The First Act Of Both The Poet And The Revolutionary. When We Take Away The Right To An Individual Name, We Symbolically Take Away The Right To Be An Individual. Immigration Officials Did This To Refugees; Husbands Routinely Do It To Wives.

Don't Ye Know That Ev'ry Soul On Earth Feels Itself To Be An Orphan?

Pain Is Not Love. Love Flowers; Love Gives Without Taking; Love Is Serene And Calm.

We've Shown Again And Again, In Every Un Report On The Status Of Women, That Wherever Women Control Their Own Bodies And Have Access To Education, Societies Prosper. Men's Fortunes Go Up, Children's Fortunes Go Up. This Is Not News - It's Been Proven Repeatedly. Anywhere Those Things Are Threatened, We Have To Defend Them.

You Should Write First Drafts As If They Will Never Be Shown To Anyone.

From Roman Times To The Present, Italy Has Been A Country To Fall In Love With - A Tribute To All That Is Enduring, Crazy, Pagan, Joyous, Melancholy, At Once Banal And Divine, In The Human Spirit.

Falling In Love

Art Is Always An Energy Exchange.

Women's Books Are Kind Of Discriminated Against. If A Man Writes A Book About His Family Stories, People Think Of It As Literature. If It's A Woman, She's 'spilling Her Guts,' And It's Not Art.

If We Ban Whatever Offends Any Group In Our Diverse Society, We Will Soon Have No Art, No Culture, No Humor, No Satire. Satire Is By Its Nature Offensive. So Is Much Art And Political Discourse. The Value Of These Expressions Far Outweighs Their Risk.

Diverse Society

I Started With Poetry Because It Was Direct, Immediate, And Short. It Was The Ecstasy Of Striking Matches In The Dark.

A Book Is A Box Brimming With Incendiary Material. The Reader Strikes The Match.

The Perfect Man Is The True Partner. Not A Bed Partner Nor A Fun Partner, But A Man Who Will Shoulder Burdens Equally With You And Possess That Quality Of Joy.

My Generation Had Doris Day As A Role Model, Then Gloria Steinem--then Princess Diana. We Are The Most Confused Generation.

I Have Ne'er Been In A Chamber With A Lawyer When I Did Not Wish Either To Scream With Desperation Or Else Fall Into The Deepest Of Sleeps, E'en When The Matter Concern'd My Own Future Most Profoundly.

When I Sit Down At My Writing Desk, Time Seems To Vanish. I Think It's A Wonderful Way To Spend One's Life.

A Man Assumes That A Woman's Refusal Is Just Part Of A Game. Or, At Any Rate, A Lot Of Men Assume That. When A Man Says No, It's No. When A Woman Says No, It's Yes, Or At Least Maybe. There Is Even A Joke To That Effect. And Little By Little, Women Begin To Believe In This View Of Themselves.

I Am Against Censorship. I Prefer The Chaos Of Uncontrollable Communication Of All Sorts To Selective Banning Of Certain Materials. I Do Not Think Human Beings Can Be Trusted To Be Above Politics And To Promote The Common Good. One Group's Common Good Is Another Group's Evil.

It Is The Artists Who Make The True Value Of The World, Though At Times They May Have To Starve To Do It. They Are Like Earthworms, Turning Up The Soil So Things Can Grow, Eating Dirt So That The Rest Of Us May Eat Green Shoots.

They Keep Saying The Right Person Will Come Along. I Think Mine Got Hit By A Truck.

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