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4f69a84
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The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.
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Colum McCann |
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c6a9870
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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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0dbe280
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The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist.Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives.
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potato-famine
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Colum McCann |
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5fca842
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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777cea5
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People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
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Colum McCann |
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b55a6d0
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The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no
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Colum McCann |
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0593574
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An optimist is a braver cynic.
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Colum McCann |
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02d3e6d
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If you think of the world without people it's about the most perfect thing there ever is. It's all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up. It's like you got Aretha Franklin in your bedroom and she's just giving it her all, she's singing just for you, she's on fire...and then all of a sudden out pops Barry Manilow from behind the curtains.
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Colum McCann |
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1b1ac8c
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The smell of the earth, so astoundingly fresh: it strikes Brown like a thing he might eat. His ears throb. His body feels as if it is still moving through the air. He is, he thinks, the first man ever to fly and stand at the exact same time. The war out of the machine. He holds the small bag of letters up in salute. On they come, soldiers, people, the light drizzle of gray. Ireland. A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same...
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Colum McCann |
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57a952c
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What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn't think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go. Even dead, he'd still do that. His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settl..
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Colum McCann |
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4003c69
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Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.
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Colum McCann |
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d20e2c2
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The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap.
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Colum McCann |
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46d2126
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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4a4d55b
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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09304ec
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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 an..
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Colum McCann |
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e847550
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There was something in the music of the accent that Douglass liked: it was as if the Cork people put long lazy hammocks in their sentences.
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Colum McCann |
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87ac57b
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It's hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light. The problem is that the images that so often return to me are seldom those I want.
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Colum McCann |
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5f7bd6f
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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d411ff7
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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02fd029
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And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn't happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening.
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what-if
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Colum McCann |
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b92ebaf
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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
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Colum McCann |
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b528ad7
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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11d6d1a
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She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.
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Colum McCann |
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b59320d
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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth. 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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9a3ae88
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Some days he wishes that he could simply empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever..
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Colum McCann |
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870e5eb
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Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.
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conclusions
food
red-wine
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Colum McCann |
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e29d828
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A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines.
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Colum McCann |
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4c5550d
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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
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Colum McCann |
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e9c1692
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Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.
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Colum McCann |
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eafe437
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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
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Colum McCann |
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7e94c64
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The overexamined life... It's not worth living.
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Colum McCann |
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baf47b3
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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a78bbc3
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The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.
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Colum McCann |
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1920eba
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It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.
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youth-age
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Colum McCann |
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f916a63
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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.
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life
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Colum McCann |
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5e1d779
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Are you saying I'm a liar? --No I'm just, like, speaking.
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Colum McCann |
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9c5339c
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It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.
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Colum McCann |
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811b944
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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a4cdc91
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Someone was high or brilliant or both.
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Colum McCann |
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b1546a1
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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 wrapy your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
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Colum McCann |
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121d86b
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What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.
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Colum McCann |
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dc707d3
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They entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger.
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potato-famine
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Colum McCann |
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c84df6c
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Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly.
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Colum McCann |
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6df9bc2
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How very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.
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Colum McCann |