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We're In An Era Where They've Sanitized Home Life In Movies To Such A Degree That There Is A Certain Home Life That Might Be True If You Have Two Perfect Parents, And A Nanny, And A Couple Babysitters, And Support, And Lots Of Money, And There's No Strain At Home, Or Whatever. But For Most People, There's Strain, You Know? There's A Lot Of Pressure, Things Can't Be Perfect, Parents Can't Be Perfect All The Time. There's A Divorce, There's Money Issues, Whatever. People Work, So You Don't Always Have These Vast Reserves Of Patience Every Time Your Kid Goes Crazy.

-Dave Eggers

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We're In An Era

Dave Eggers

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We're In An Era Where They've Sanitized Home Life In Movies To Such A Degree That There Is A Certain Home Life That Might Be True If You Have Two Perfect Parents, And A Nanny, And A Couple Babysitters, And Support, And Lots Of Money, And There's No Strain At Home, Or Whatever. But For Most People, There's Strain, You Know? There's A Lot Of Pressure, Things Can't Be Perfect, Parents Can't Be Perfect All The Time. There's A Divorce, There's Money Issues, Whatever. People Work, So You Don't Always Have These Vast Reserves Of Patience Every Time Your Kid Goes Crazy.

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He Remained, Weeks After Awakening, In That Period Of Early-morning Consciousness That Allows Easy Re-entry To Dreaming. His Limbs Still Tingled With The Residue Of Sleep, And Most Days He Wanted Badly To Allow It To Overtake Him Again.

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My Parents Told Me They Were Going To Kill Me At Least A Thousand Times Growing Up. "i'm Gonna Kill You," And Then They'd Whack Me On The Side Of The Head Or Whatever. And "what's Wrong With You?" And "i'm Gonna Lock You Up," And "i'm Gonna Throw You Out The Window," And "i'm Gonna Kill You." You Know, All These Things That You Say In The Heat Of A Normal Chaotic Household.

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Hello Frances, I Have Just Been To Health Class, And I Was Wondering How Your Feminine Parts Were Developing.

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But The Grind Has Begun. The Windows Don’t Open, And Even The Availability Of Near-constant Jokes About Jews And Mormons Fails To Stem The Tide Of Frustration, Decay. We’ve Reached The End Of Pure Inspiration, And Are Now Somewhere Else, Something Implying Routine, Or Doing Something Because People Expect Us To Do It, Going Somewhere Each Day Because We Went There The Day Before, Saying Things Because We Have Said Them Before, And This Seems Like The Work Of A Different Sort Of Animal, Contrary To Our Plan, And This Is Very Very Bad.

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It Was Always Difficult To Get Cattle Returned Once A Marriage Was Dissolved.

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So I Should Be Aware Of The Dangers Of Self-consciousness, But At The Same Time, I’ll Be Plowing Through The Fog Of All These Echoes, Plowing Through Mixed Metaphors, Noise, And Will Try To Show The Core, Which Is Still There, As A Core, And Is Valid, Despite The Fog. The Core Is The Core Is The Core. There Is Always The Core, That Can’t Be Articulated. Only Caricatured.

Once A Year, She Remembers That She Is Insignificant. Then She Forgets Agains, Because More Than She Is Insignificant, She Is Forgetful.

I'm Interested In The Human Impact Of The Giant Foot Of Misplaced Government. After All, We Encounter It Every Day.

Again The Greatest Use Of A Human Was To Be Useful. Not To Consume, Not To Watch, But To Do Something For Someone Else That Improved Their Life, Even For A Few Minutes.

His Lies Were So Exquisite I Almost Wept.

The Only Thing That Everyone Needs To Look Out For Is Keeping The Students Reading Through High School And Thereafter.

And What We Were Trying To Offer Every Day Was One-on-one Attention. The Goal Was To Have A One-to-one Ratio With Every One Of These Students.

Yes, A Dark Time Passed Over This Land, But Now There Is Something Like Light.

We Have Advantages. We Have A Cushion To Fall Back On. This Is Abundance. A Luxury Of Place And Time. Something Rare And Wonderful. It's Almost Historically Unprecedented. We Must Do Extraordinary Things. We Have To. It Would Be Absurd Not To.

Why Did We Do That To Pluto? We Had It Good With Pluto.

It's So Easy To Print In The Midwest. You're Saving Months In Shipping And Customs, So We Have Started Printing A Number Of Books There.

You Treat A Kid With Respect And As An Adult You Talk To Them As If They're Smart People. But You Don't Throw At Them The Trappings Of Adulthood And You Know, The Darker Stuff.

I Always Had A Hard Time With Fiction. It Does Feel Like Driving A Car In A Clown Suit. You're Going Somewhere, But You're In Costume, And You're Not Really Fooling Anybody. You're The Guy In Costume, And Everybody's Supposed To Forget That And Go Along With You. Obviously, It Can Work, It Works All The Time - Well, It Doesn't Always Work. Still, No Matter What, I'm Always Looking At The Form And Addressing It, Not Ignoring It.

The Pain Is Not Great. But The Symbolism Is Disagreeable.

I Worked At Salon.com Way Back When They Started, And There's Just Unmeasurable Value To Distributing Words Online, Too, But I Still Get My News From The Newspaper In The Morning.

A Combination Of Acting, Lying, Begging, And Cheating.

But That's One Lifetime." Yeah." But While Doing That One I'd Want To Be Able To Have Done Other Stuff. Whole Other Lives- The One Where I Sail-" I Know, On A Boat You Made Yourself.

Here I Am Rock You Like A Hurricane.

We've Become A Nation Of Indoor Cats, He'd Said. A Nation Of Doubters, Worriers, Overthinkers. Thank God These Weren't The Kind Of Americans Who Settled This Country. They Were A Different Breed! They Crossed The Country In Wagons With Wooden Wheels! People Croaked Along The Way, And They Barely Stopped. Back Then, You Buried Your Dead And Kept Moving.

There Is No Faith Like The Faith Of A Builder Of Homes In Coastal Louisiana

The Only Infallible Truth Of Our Lives Is That Everything We Love In Life Will Be Taken From Us.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Utopia: We've Turned Into This Surveillance Society And Become A Race Of Spies, Where We Track Our Kids And We Track Our Spouses And We Track Our Friends. I Think Very Soon There Will Be An Obsolescence Of Trust, Because It's Much Easier To Access A Person's Location Than It Is To Ask - Or To Trust.

I Worked At Magazines For Over 10 Years Before I Even Thought Of Writing A Book.

We Are Unusual And Tragic And Alive.

He Was Feeling Buoyant, Flexible. He Wanted To Go Jogging. He Stood. He Couldn't Go Jogging. He Called Room Service And Ordered A Basket Of Breads And Pastries.

Every Part Of My Body Felt Electric. My Chest Ached And My Head Throbbed With The Great Terrible Limitless Possibility Of The Morning, And When It Came, The Sky Was Washed White, Everything Was New, And I Hadn't Slept At All.

We're In An Era Where They've Sanitized Home Life In Movies To Such A Degree That There Is A Certain Home Life That Might Be True If You Have Two Perfect Parents, And A Nanny, And A Couple Babysitters, And Support, And Lots Of Money, And There's No Strain At Home, Or Whatever. But For Most People, There's Strain, You Know? There's A Lot Of Pressure, Things Can't Be Perfect, Parents Can't Be Perfect All The Time. There's A Divorce, There's Money Issues, Whatever. People Work, So You Don't Always Have These Vast Reserves Of Patience Every Time Your Kid Goes Crazy.

People Are Strange, But More Than That, They're Good. They're Good First, Then Strange.

Having Lost People When They Were Young, You Feel Intimately Acquainted With Mortality, I Guess. Though I Procrastinate Worse Than Anybody.

In All My Life I'd Never Been Approached This Way, The Car Pulling Up, The Where You Going? It Was Something I Wish Had Happened Hundreds Of Times. I Was A Looker - Someone Who Looked Over At Every Car At Every Traffic Light, Hoping Something Would Happen, And Almost Never Finding Anyone Looking Back - Always Everyone Looking Forwards, And Every Time I Felt Stupid. Why Should People Look At You? Why Should They Care?

There Is Travel And There Are Babies; Everything Else Is Drudgery And Death.

Write Your Goddamned Book Now. The World Awaits.

No. There Is No Balance, And No Retribution, And No Rules. The Rules And Balances You Blather About Are Hopeful Creations Of A Man Fearing Death.

Maybe He Hadn't Thought The War Through. It Had Seemed Like Simple Fun When He Had First Pictured It, With A Glorious Beginning, A Difficult But Valor-filled Middle, And A Victorious End. He Hadn't Accounted For The Fact That There Might Not Be Much Of A Resolution To The Battle, And He Hadn't Imagined What It Would Feel Like When The War Just Sort Of Ended, Without Anyone Admitting Defeat And Congratulating Him For His Bravery.

Still Though, I Think If You're Not Self-obsessed, You're Probably Boring.

The Air Is Like Being Wanted, We Say, And They Nod Approvingly. The Air Is Like Getting Older, They Say, And They Touch Our Arms Gently.

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George Plimpton

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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