We Need to Talk About Kevin
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5%
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You were ambitious—for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart.
7%
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Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.
9%
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I had never eaten a McDonald’s hot apple pie. (I confess: I liked it.) Someday, you observed, there would be no McDonald’s. Just because there are lots of them doesn’t mean that the hot apple pies aren’t excellent or that it isn’t a privilege to live in a time when you can buy them for 99 cents. That was one of your favorite themes: that profusion, replication, popularity wasn’t necessarily devaluing, and that time itself made all things rare. You loved to savor the present tense and were more conscious than anyone I have ever met that its every constituent is fleeting.
10%
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It didn’t seem sensible that he should be the one mad at me. But in the same vein, when a car nearly sideswipes me in a crosswalk, I’ve noticed that the driver is frequently furious—shouting, gesticulating, cursing—at me, whom he nearly ran over and who had the undisputed right of way. This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.
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I blamed me, and he blamed me. I felt ganged up on.
13%
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Lo, everything that made me pretty was intrinsic to motherhood, and my very desire that men find me attractive was the contrivance of a body designed to expel its own replacement. I don’t want to pretend that I’m the first woman to discover the birds and the bees. But all this was new to me. And frankly, I wasn’t so sure about it. I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn’t initiate or choose, that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used.
20%
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I had been awaiting something large and amorphous, a vast big thing so marvelous that I could not even imagine it. The party she threw was all too imaginable. For that matter, had she brought in a brass band and magicians I’d have still been crestfallen. There was no extravagance that would not have fallen short, because it would be finite and fixed, one thing and not another. It would be only what it was.
30%
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Nothing is interesting if you are not interested. In vain, I had been waiting for Kevin to prove out, to demonstrate as I stood arms folded that he was worthy of my ardor. That was too much to demand of a little boy, who would only be as lovable to me as I allowed him to be. It was past time that I at least met Kevin halfway.
35%
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“But would you like to see him punished?” your father pressed. Mind, he didn’t sound wrathful; he hadn’t the energy. I’m afraid I laughed. Just a dejected huh! Still, it wasn’t appropriate. “I’m sorry,” I explained. “But good luck to them. I tried for the better part of sixteen years to punish Kevin. Nothing I took away mattered to him in the first place. What’s the New York state juvenile justice system going to do? Send him to his room? I tried that. He didn’t have much use for anything outside his room, or in it; what’s the difference? And they’re hardly going to shame him. You can only ...more
39%
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People seem able to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
41%
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In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
44%
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We may have made a mistake in sending him to a Montessori kindergarten, whose philosophy of human nature was, at the least, optimistic. Its supervised but unstructured education—kids were placed in a “stimulating” environment, with play stations including alphabet blocks, counting beads, and pea plants—presumed that children were inborn autodidacts. Yet in my experience, when left to their own devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.
44%
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I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles, and an upstairs neighbor who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.
44%
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I’ve no idea why we parents persist in believing that our kids yearn to be thought of as nice, since when we ourselves commend acquaintances as very nice we usually mean they’re dull.
57%
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You can call it innocence or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: She assumed that everyone else was just like her.
Once again, the truth is always larger than what we make of it.