Quote

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

Walter Kirn

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Walter Kirn
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: August 3
Novelist
Writer
Akron
Ohio
Even
Negotiable
Make
Potent
Draw
Draws
Level
Levels
Virtue
Lines
Indefensible

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Some strangers become more important to you than family, maybe because you're not expected to love them. You can leave them whenever you want to. They can, too. Every moment together is a choice.
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Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn
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It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
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Requesting permission from someone to be honest is really a way of accusing the other person of being so demanding or overbearing that you couldn't be honest all along.
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The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.
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Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.
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I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
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Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?
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The best critic needn't be right, just interesting.
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It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.
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Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
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A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.
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Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.
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You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.
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At the beginning of a novel, a writer needs confidence, but after that what's required is persistence. These traits sound similar. They aren't. Confidence is what politicians, seducers and currency speculators have, but persistence is a quality found in termites. It's the blind drive to keep on working that persists after confidence breaks down.
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To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your “Core Attachments,” means apologizing for your very existence.
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In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth.
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I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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The best anti-depressant pill for me would be one the size of a house so you could drop it on me and put me out of my misery.
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