Leads de Stein Flashcards
The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid,
sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.
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On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five
travelers into the gulf below.
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Yank Lucas fell asleep late one night and left the gas burning on the kitchen range.
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“What’s the matter?” she asked.
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She might have been waiting for her lover.
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“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”
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The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him.
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It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced the archbishop had come to see me.
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On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past.
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When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow.
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What made me take this trip to Africa?
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If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
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Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.
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I wanted to strangle mother but I’d have to touch her to do it.
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It would have been nice if the stork had dropped me down the right chimney.
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A telephone ringing in the middle of the night is not a welcome sound.
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My name is Johnny Hake. I’m thirty-six years old, stand five feet eleven in my socks, weigh one hundred and forty-two pounds stripped, and am, so to speak, naked at the moment and talking into the dark. I was conceived in the Hotel St. Regis, born in the Presbyterian Hospital, raised on Sutton Place, christened and confirmed in St. Bartholomew’s, and I drilled with the Knickerbocker Greys, played football and baseball in Central Park, learned to chin myself on the framework of East Side apartment-house canopies, and met my wife (Christina Lewis) at one of those big cotillions at the Waldorf. I served four years in the Navy, have four kids now, and live in a banlieue called Shady Hill. We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in Heaven, I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.
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When she was home from her boarding school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annex. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood right behind her once in a queue at the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like Burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist, sometimes in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once, before she came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it loose and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
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Here on a stony meadow in West Texas at the end of 10 miles of unpaved road through mesquitecovered, coyote-infested shrub land, several hundred bearers of a strategic commodity of the United States of America are gathered. They are goats.
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An 87-year-old water main ruptured outside of Grand Central Terminal just before the morning rush hour yesterday, unleashing a deluge that ruined a newly renovated subway station and plunged commuters into a snarl of flooded subway lines and pulverized asphalt. The 20-inch main, which runs east and west along 42d Street between Park and Lexington Avenue, broke at about 5:45 A.M. Water surged upward, heaving 42d Street into a small mountain range, then cascaded down staircases and ventilation grates like so many waterfalls, flooding the subway tracks below. The repair process was delayed for hours because the city’s Environmental Protection Department misidentified the site of the rupture and mistakenly shut off the wrong main.
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As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding into buildings all around, a disheveled stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.
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Yesterday morning Henry Sorbino walked into the K-Mart on Eleventh Street carrying an umbrella and walked out carrying an umbrella and someone else’s purse.
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At exactly 10:19 a.m. yesterday, a grandmother’s purse on a conveyor belt at Orange County airport set off an alarm that caused two security guards to rush to the scene.
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