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'Show off' was no insult in our family, but Arty had a way of turning 'sweetheart' into a thumb in the eye.
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An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.
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Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.
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It is time to recognize the variability of females, just as we do males.
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Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.
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I thought if I just told the truth, the human truth, it'd be the truth for everyone.
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In a really good, closely matched situation, the style of the boxer is every bit as explicit and specific to him as a painter's hand.
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I'm just a regular Joe.
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Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.
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At its heart, 'Fat City' is not about boxing. It is a universal story of grim realities and toxic delusions. It is awash with awareness of chances blown, dreams stymied, precious time wasted, and all future prospects scorched to ashes by the process.
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Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.
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I wanted to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love.
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Most professional fighters, male and female, hold day jobs, but the women's game attracts a wide social spectrum: hash slingers, teachers, police officers, landscapers, stuntwomen. Many are wives and mothers. Their husbands or boyfriends work their corners, or hide in arena restrooms, scared to watch their bouts.
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A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.
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I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.
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I'd always been fascinated by boxing and became very engaged with it through my husband, actually. But I started to write about it because so many decent, righteous people wanted it banned.
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The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and closer, then below, to the worms and the centipede.
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This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.
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I know that some of the finest writing I've ever read has been sports writing, whatever the topic was, whatever the sport they were writing about. It seems to be an area where people are allowed a little more leeway than when they're reporting on traffic jams and city-council meetings.
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No, I've never competed. I did, however, train in a boxing gym with a good coach beginning in 1993. I'd been writing about the sport for a dozen years by then and wanted to know what boxers endured, what it felt like. I was too old to compete when I started, but I sparred enough to get a taste.
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Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches.
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I'm slow by everybody's standards. But not by mine.
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My dad was a third-generation printer and linotype operator, by all accounts a fabulous ballroom dancer. He was jettisoned from the family before I was 2, and I have never met him and have no memory of him.
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The molasses voice pours into the sponge ear of the microphone and is transformed into silent, pulsing waves that radiate over a hundred miles.