colum mccann

“Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.”

“In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. 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.”

“Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.”

“He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place. and he was in the habit of hoping for it.”

“C'è chi pensa che l'amore sia la fine della strada, e che se si è abbastanza fortunati da trovarlo ci si ferma lì. Altri dicono che è come un burrone nel quale si precipita. Ma chiunque abbia vissuto almeno un po' sa che muta con il passare dei giorni, e secondo l'energia che gli si dedica, lo si conserva o ci si aggrappa, oppure lo si perde, ma a volte capita che non sia nemmeno mai stato lì, sin dall'inizio."( Questo bacio vada al mondo intero)”

“Goodness is more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love.”

“This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.”

“Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.”

“So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.”

“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”

“The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.”

“You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven...”

“We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.”

“No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.”

“I was reminded of how years before, he had drifted away from one of our afternoon strolls and got surrounded by the tide - Corrigan, isolated on a sandbar, tangled in light, voices from the shores drifting over him, calling his name.”

“Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.”

“The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.”

“We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.”

“The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.”

“...while the others--those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther--felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky.”

“...a domino line of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, fail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage”

“Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”

“It's the sort of hum that makes you feel that you're the actual ground lying under the sky, a blue hum that's all above and around you, but if you think about it too hard it will get too loud or big, and make you feel no more than just a speck.”

“He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.”

“How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.”

“She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.”

“Wir stolpern dahin, tragen ein wenig Geräusch in die Stille und wirken in anderen fort.”

“Wenn wir gehen, nehmen wir unsere Heimat mit.”

“Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”

“Someone was high or brilliant or both.”

“death by drowning, death by snakebite ... death by memory loss, death by claymore ... death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game ... death by authority, death by isolation, death by genocide, death by Kennedy ... death by signature, death by silence ... death by performance”

“They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who'd soon turn into empty chairs.”

“Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.”

“There was a quote about "standing in a river too long or long enough" that I can't find now. Anyone remember? If so, what page?”

“The watchers below pulled their breath in all at once. The air suddenly felt shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.”

“Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.”

“It was America, after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted. But what if you were the one walking underneath? What if the tightrope walker really had fallen? It was quite possible that he could have killed not just himself, but a dozen people below. Recklessness and freedom - how did they become a cocktail?”

“The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That's where the camera came in. It was the unspoken thing between him and the others.”

“It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to make sense. The squirrel scampered up a tree trunk, the sound of its nails like water in a tub.”

“She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.”

“The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.”

“With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”

“The tightrope walk was an act of creation that seemed to stand in direct defiance to the act of destruction twenty-seven years later.About Let the Great World Spin”

“He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along --trying to wound his faith in order to test it--and I was just another stone in the way of his God.”

“He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.”

“They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.”

“Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”

“Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”

“Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.”

“...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.”