colum mccann

“The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself.”

“Въртящи се врати изхвърляха четвъртинки разговор на улицата.”

“Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.”

“All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.”

“Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.”

“He was the son of his son--he was here, he was left behind.”

“There was something of the beautiful failure about her.”

“I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.”

“You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lifted miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day umtouched, some old, lost sweet tasting time.”

“There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance.”

“The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.”

“It's about fear. You know! They're all throbbing with fear. We all are.... Bits of it floating in the air. It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's there and it's all coming down, covering everything. You're breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it's so fine you don't notice it. But you're covered in it. It's everywhere. What I mean is, we're afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we've stopped to take account of it, we'd just fall into despair. But we can't stop. We've for to keep going.”

“I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.”

“All the lives we could live, all the people we would never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

“Darkness doesn't fall, he thought as he swayed to the radio, it rises up from the bottom of the sea and begins to breathe around us.”

“She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.”

“I suppose I've always known that it's hard to be just one person. the key is in the door and it can always be opened.”

“Her smile could've broken glass.”

“Her smile colud've broen glass.”

“Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all at once, twice, three times.”

“She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.”

“That he'd see the light and it'd still be in a tunnel.”

“He could be in any mood or any place and, unbidden, it returned.”

“...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether. ”

“At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own.”

“There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again.”

“A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.”

“She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.”

“There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?”

“You're manic-depressive and you're manic-depressive too and you, you're definitely manic-depressive, girl. And you over there in the corner, you're just plain fucking depressive.”

“--I'm not God. --Then find someone who is, man.”

“--Are you saying I'm a liar?--No I'm just, like, speaking.”

“--A priest? I said. --A monk or some such. One of those worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis. --Theologian, said the other. --One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare.”

“She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs-- she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.”

“There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.”

“Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.”

“Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there, but I'll tell you anyways: once upon a time and long ago...”

“But being rational about it didn't cure it.”

“If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.”

“I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me.”

“It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn't want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn't want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.”

“It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.”

“Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.'My own sons,' he said.We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside.”

“A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle.”

“There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.”

“Another day, another dolor.”

“I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student – thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.”

“The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium. He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.”

“He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.”

“The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie’s jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain.”