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e4eeed2
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The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.
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Colum McCann |
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a57d972
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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bd8a354
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The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.
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Colum McCann |
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a43d521
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There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.
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travel
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Colum McCann |
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d676413
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Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
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literature
untold-stories
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Colum McCann |
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4e5ecfa
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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.
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perfection
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Colum McCann |
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73c824e
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Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
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Colum McCann |
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69da965
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The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
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Colum McCann |
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e289e7a
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Good days, they come around the oddest corners.
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Colum McCann |
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05d4af3
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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65be85f
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I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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Colum McCann |
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7144f0c
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He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.
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naive
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Colum McCann |
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b2d1c9e
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There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.
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Colum McCann |
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affe8e9
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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
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Colum McCann |
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07a0650
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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a3ed9cb
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I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.
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Colum McCann |
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69ff3fd
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Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.
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Colum McCann |
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7dca936
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People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
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Colum McCann |
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1b05130
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it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
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Colum McCann |
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283b4a7
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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0f1bdaf
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Nobody falls halfway
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Colum McCann |
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a47adfe
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I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
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Colum McCann |
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8dd7245
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With all respects to heaven, I like it here.
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Colum McCann |
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ecbd645
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Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.
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Colum McCann |
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609783b
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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908be55
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One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange thing..
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Colum McCann |
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d8937b9
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There are no days more full than those we go back to.
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Colum McCann |
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e4d61c8
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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.
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humanity
truth
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Colum McCann |
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d4d091f
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I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock i..
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Colum McCann |
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e2357a1
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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.
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heaven
light
god
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Colum McCann |
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135439e
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Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.
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Colum McCann |
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2f467b8
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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
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Colum McCann |
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1a1bd47
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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Colum McCann |
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1a4bb80
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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c31af4a
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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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Colum McCann |
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c2f7d72
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It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.
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Colum McCann |
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89d3ca6
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She wanted to tell him so mach, 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.
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Colum McCann |
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0236deb
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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.
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let-the-great-world-spin
fuck
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Colum McCann |
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559e7bf
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He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.
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Colum McCann |
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a06e646
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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
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Colum McCann |
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715a5a6
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If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
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Colum McCann |
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f975975
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The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.
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Colum McCann |
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ce65c8e
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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it's still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
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Colum McCann |
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ba0f9ed
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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.
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Colum McCann |