{
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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/walter-tevis/mockingbird/i-was-in-a-state",
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  "text": "I was in a state of yearning, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy.\n\nThis is terrible! I thought. All those lies! I felt physically sick to see it all: to see myself slack-jawed as a child in front of the television, to see myself in classes being told by robot teachers that “inward development” was the aim of life, that “quick sex is best,” that the only reality was in my consciousness and that it could be altered chemically. What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved. And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.",
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    "title": "Mockingbird",
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      "slug": "noticing-and-thinking",
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      "text": "Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”",
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      "text": "I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.",
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      "text": "When literacy died, so had history.",
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