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  "text": "Somewhere between half a mile and a quarter of a mile from what the officers were calling ground zero, there was no sidewalk or even rubble under foot. Everything has been fused to what looked like rough, crude glass. It felt like hard, unyielding glass under Flora’s feet, too.\n\n“My God,” she said over and over. She wasn’t the only one, either. She watched a Catholic Congressman cross himself, and another take out a rosary and move his lips in prayer. When you saw something like this, what could you do but pray? But wasn’t a God Who allowed such things deaf to mere blandishments?",
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      "text": "You have to understand what you’re fighting for. Otherwise, you were an animal—a brave animal, maybe, but an animal all the same.",
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      "text": "After a case like that, writing about the work O’Doull had done during the war didn’t seem so bad. That, at least, had mattered. This? While he was sewing and splinting and cutting, he looked forward to this with a fierce and simple longing. Now that he had it again, he discovered the danger of getting exactly what you thought you wanted. It could prove as unfortunate in real life as in fairy tales.",
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      "text": "Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started—you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy.",
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