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ba498de
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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e38da0c
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I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.
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Colum McCann |
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9c4bd3c
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That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.
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Colum McCann |
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a9a0858
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I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it."
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truth
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Colum McCann |
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5c94a06
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There is always room for at least two truths.
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Colum McCann |
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1cb9a4d
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And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.
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Colum McCann |
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ec3ca6d
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Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
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Colum McCann |
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a8fe9b2
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It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.
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Colum McCann |
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e5e297f
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She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.
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Colum McCann |
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b3b86b6
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What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the pre..
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Colum McCann |
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223fa57
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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86f1069
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Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
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death
endings
growing-older
living-life
problems
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Colum McCann |
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3a986a6
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What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.
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Colum McCann |
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a3a6c02
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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387bcaf
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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fb0b59e
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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01ca56b
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The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.
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beauty
grace
living-life-to-the-fullest
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Colum McCann |
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dc31a23
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The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.
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Colum McCann |
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1959644
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The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
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Colum McCann |
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5fe5487
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You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven...
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Colum McCann |
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54f43ba
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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ef4cc75
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We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.
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humanity
truth
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Colum McCann |
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3200f3a
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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895cfb7
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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c85af7e
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How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.
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Colum McCann |
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367d779
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and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
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hate
immigration
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Colum McCann |
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0e546ef
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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bd0ec87
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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
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Colum McCann |
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5162cc7
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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57971fd
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We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.
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mortality
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Colum McCann |
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e6d3b13
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Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
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Colum McCann |
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c18a70e
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When I sat down beside them, their silence was lined with tenderness. We have to admire the world for not ending on us.
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Colum McCann |
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308e5f7
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I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.
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Colum McCann |
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ba60b01
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But being rational about it didn't cure it.
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Colum McCann |
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c9df398
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He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.
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Colum McCann |
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8590689
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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..
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dancer
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Colum McCann |
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cdc01e1
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The conspiracy of women. We are in it together, make no mistake.
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Colum McCann |
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8ba6230
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Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.
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Colum McCann |
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1546841
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What was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves if incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other.
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Colum McCann |
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2e4d83d
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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835ebdd
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There was something of the beautiful failure about her.
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Colum McCann |
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aa803b4
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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cdc38e9
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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631d88c
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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.
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Colum McCann |