The Book of Strange New Things
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Read between August 1 - August 13, 2021
71%
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It was all a bit of a blur.
71%
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Penn Hackney
What!? What do they use instead?
71%
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you haven’t really told me anything about those difficylties.
71%
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All I can see, from the few morsels you’ve shared with me is that you’re having a big adventure up there.
71%
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As far as I can tell you arrived to a hero’s welcome. USIC drives you to the Oasans and picks you up again when you’re ready for a rest. Your congregation all love Jesus already and think you’re the bee’s knees and want nothing from you but Bible study. You supervise building works while getting a suntan and every now and then somebody brings you a painting to hang up on the ceiling.
71%
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Any other husband, once he got wind ofg what’s been going on here would have offered to come home by now.
Penn Hackney
The crux
71%
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Penn Hackney
Haha
72%
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Penn Hackney
Haha - solipsistic humor
72%
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Penn Hackney
Simile
72%
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“Hey, you’ll feel better soon. It’s all perceptual. Chemical, even. Feeling down, feeling up, it’s a cycle.
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Penn Hackney
Haha
72%
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They should be sleeping together.
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Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words.
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a nest of animal ...
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72%
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Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companio...
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72%
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Penn Hackney
Haha - serves him right
73%
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The simplemindedness of the question irked her.
73%
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Penn Hackney
Haha
73%
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you’re acting like a little boy who feels the whole universe has collapsed when his mother is angry with him but who then feels everything is all right again when she says she loves him.
73%
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Our love can’t be erased by a bit of unhappiness. But that doesn’t mean our love can cure unhappiness, either.
73%
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unable or unwilling to offer me emotional support.
73%
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Penn Hackney
Haha
73%
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Penn Hackney
Haha
73%
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Penn Hackney
Haha
73%
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this was a distortion, a tragic misconception. It was the frenzy of the moth butting against the lightbulb when there was an open window nearby. God was that open window.
74%
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Penn Hackney
Haha - ordinary appetite again
74%
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Penn Hackney
Haha
74%
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The Oasans knew nothing about money and recognized no difference between vocation and employment.
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The whole parable was untranslatable.
74%
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As he thought more, however, his urge to argue dwindled and all that was left was love.
74%
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Penn Hackney
She didn’t misjudge him; he has no clue what she - and the country, and the world - is going through, and he doesn’t even want to imagine, or empathize.
74%
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She was overwhelmed, she was in distress, she needed help. Rightness or wrongness was not the point. Giving her strength was the point.
74%
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A barrage of suffering borne in unaccustomed loneliness had weakened her faith.
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Rhetoric and arguments were useless and, in the circumstances, cruel.
74%
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perhaps he’d grown accustomed to the humidity at last.
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Snowdonia.
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In foreign phrases, exotic power lurked.
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The lack of self-absorption he’d noted in these people from the outset went deep into the language itself:
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there were no words for most of the emotions that humans devoted endless energy to describing.
75%
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a neutral recognition that life wasn’t turning out as planned.
75%
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Faith, hope, intention, objective, desire, plan, wish, the future, the road ahead … these were all the same thing, apparently.
76%
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Penn Hackney
Haha
76%
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“Your wife Bea: one. We are many.” “A very John Stuart Mill observation.”
Penn Hackney
Haha. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
76%
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Funny how a service you’re accustomed to paying a few pence for (in tax) suddenly seems cheap at a hundred times the price.
76%
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Penn Hackney
Haha
76%
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Chocolate and cashmere pullovers.
76%
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Penn Hackney
Bible - “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”
77%
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Penn Hackney
Haha - and don’t ask
77%
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Only the most swollen, senile specimens were chosen.
78%
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“Nice guy. And good at his job, too.” It seemed a fatuous remark to make: everyone chosen by USIC was nice and good at their job.
Penn Hackney
Haha
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