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Laura van den Berg Books

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The Third Hotel

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“She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived. It could look like innovation and progress and prosperity, courage even, but more than anything it looked, to some, like a solution--a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.”

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Book:I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
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“I go to the pages on the coffee table, curious to see what upset my sister. The more I read the more it becomes clear that my mother is now an advocate for the voluntary human extinction movement. The problem with every utopia, my mother writes, is that they are designed for people. When in fact there cannot be a utopia with people in it. When in fact we are the problem.”

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Book:State of Paradise
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“This is the problem with the gig economy, I think as I squirm around in the trunk. Everyone is so vulnerable and the rules for what constitutes civilized behavior--well, they're coming apart so quickly I've decided those rules were illusions all along. We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy.... The system is designed to keep us so depleted that we forget our sense of decency and become so mercenary about our own survival that we have nothing left to contribute to the common good.”

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Book:I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories
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“In the ER, a voice asked, "Do you know where you are?" I only knew I was trapped inside a great pandemonium. A horrific brightness. Even these days I am, at times, surprised to find myself unsure of my whereabouts. For example, I thought that I was pretty well acquainted with the world I lived in, but then the pandemic happened and that world transformed into something else.”

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Book:State of Paradise
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“It wasn't that she wanted so badly to remain in Paris; more than anything, she was incapable of deciding, of striking in a different, unknown direction, and was frustrated by her inability to release herself from her life as easily as her husband had, a top spiraling across a flat surface.”

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Book:What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
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“After all, the media was flooded with stories about people suffering from post-traumatic stress; his behavior had seemed understandable. It wasn't until the Paris riots that she realized how much he'd changed, as though some dark seed buried inside him had found the ideal conditions for growth. And after he left, she was forced to recognize how she'd changed as well, her determined cheerfulness and willful ignorance, her ability to read the newspaper and then push the unpleasantness from her mind (how typical, how bourgeoisie, how very American, she thought now), as though the world wasn't shifting very much at all, as though everything wasn't disintegrating beneath them.”

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Book:What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
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“What did the woman tell you?" she asked. "What did she say when she took my hand?" "That she could see everything inside you," he said. "And then she told me what was there." Juliana didn't press any further. She wasn't at all sure she wanted to know what was inside of her.”

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Book:What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
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“Behind every death lay a set of questions. To move on was to agree to not disturb these questions, to let them settle with the body under the earth. Yet some questions so thoroughly dismantled the terms of your own life, turning away was gravitationally impossible. So she would not be moving on. She would keep disturbing and disturbing. She imagined herself standing over a grave with a shovel and hacking away at the soil.”

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Book:The Third Hotel
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“My point here is that the grieving are very dangerous, Richard said. They are like injured animals with fearsome claws, bloodied and pushed into a corner. Okay, said Clare. They are deranged, he continued. They shouldn't be let out of the house. Immediately after the funeral some sort of waiting period should be instituted, a period of confinement. It is a matter of public safety.”

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Book:The Third Hotel
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“Something she and her husband had in common but rarely discussed was the absence of a desire for children, to fill their home with people besides themselves. It was a silent agreement, felt rather than spoken, and in her experience the soundest agreements were the ones that did not require the reassurances of language. Therefore this line of questioning was the inverse of what she usually fielded, since a childless married woman in her thirties was so often regarded, by men and women alike, as a puzzle or a pity. What's the story here? people would ask, inquests designed to make women like her suspect there was something malformed inside, blinding them to the hideous reality of their choice.”

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Book:The Third Hotel
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“My mother has taken an interest in utopian texts, now that Florida seems to be heading in the opposite direction, though every time she describes one of these alleged paradises they sound a little terrifying. Too much manual labor and religious fervor. In the end, my mother often seems disappointed by these utopias too; she is still searching for her true north.”

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Book:State of Paradise
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