Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (2009)

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There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

Colum McCann
Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

Colum McCann
It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

Colum McCann
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 niche and make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can.

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

Colum McCann
She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. 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. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple - hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat.

Colum McCann
She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.

Colum McCann
That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

Colum McCann
Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.

Colum McCann
The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

Colum McCann
The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.

Colum McCann
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday...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. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.

Colum McCann
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.

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

Colum McCann
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.

Colum McCann
There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

Colum McCann
People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time - but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

Colum McCann
He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.

Colum McCann
Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.

Colum McCann
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.

Colum McCann
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

Colum McCann
Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

Colum McCann
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.

Colum McCann
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 it really was, what it meant.

Colum McCann
The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

Colum McCann