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53221ab
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If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.
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Colum McCann |
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fca4c8e
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there was always hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent,as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so.
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Colum McCann |
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d6e34fa
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If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.
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Colum McCann |
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409b193
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Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there, but I'll tell you anyways: once upon a time and long ago...
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Colum McCann |
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e3fdb4c
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There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?
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Colum McCann |
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587f5d0
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What happened then was that, for an instant, almost nothing happened. He wasn't even there. Failure didn't even cross his mind. It felt like a sort of floating. He could have been in the meadow. His body loosened and took on the shape of the wind. The play of the shoulder could instruct the ankle. His throat could soothe his heel and moisten the ligaments at his ankle. A touch of the tongue against the teeth could relax the thigh. His elbow..
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Colum McCann |
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d4778c1
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That the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget.
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Colum McCann |
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ab8c921
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The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure.
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Colum McCann |
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c56ffbf
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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0cfafb8
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I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan ha..
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Colum McCann |
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eda0089
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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?
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Colum McCann |
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73f3afd
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The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
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Colum McCann |
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dc3acae
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I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.
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sorrow
secrets
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Colum McCann |
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6d2a682
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Claire wants to say: 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 once, twice, three times. But all she does is smile at Marcia and give her what she hopes is a nod that understands that it's absolutely no problem to say fuck, on Park Avenue, on a Wednesday, at a coffee morning, in fact it's probably the best thing to say, given the circumstances, maybe t..
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Colum McCann |
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adbea2d
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A writer is an explorer. She knows she wants to get somewhere, but she doesn't know if the somewhere even exists yet. It is still to be created. A Galapagos of the imagination. A whole new theory of who we are. Don
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Colum McCann |
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bf15011
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He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried.
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Colum McCann |
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f7f94fe
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gr bh zndgy mhlt khfy bdhy hmh mshkhltt r Hl khwhd khrd, Hty mshkhl zndhbwdn r.
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Colum McCann |
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5760d76
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The short sharp shock of three thousand mother 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 ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow - not wi..
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the-troubles
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Colum McCann |
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c6b6f63
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The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie's jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain.
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Colum McCann |
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0256102
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We are being bought off by our affair with the contemporary drug of choice: ease.
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societal-decay
complacency
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Colum McCann |
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10e4fee
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For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.
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Colum McCann |
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4dfc695
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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
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Colum McCann |
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2a1fd2e
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She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria's dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Missouri. The smile on Gloria's face. Her sister, Janice, in the front seat, driving. Playing games with the rearview mirror. Both of them pushing Gloria in a wheelchair along the banks of the river, Up a lazy river where the robin's song wakes a..
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Colum McCann |
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e97d279
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What is it about wine, Harry? --What d'ya mean? --What is it that cures us? --Made to glorify the gods. And dull the idiots.
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idiots
wine
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Colum McCann |
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f3c8645
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I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.
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electricity
new-york-city
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Colum McCann |
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4ae7c9b
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You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!
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Colum McCann |
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212e4c9
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A brand-new thought: She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over, The distance finally broken.
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Colum McCann |
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e0ff87b
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What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday.
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Colum McCann |
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e34befa
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The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.
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Colum McCann |
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3b641a3
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Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.
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Colum McCann |
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0a17888
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His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.
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slavery
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Colum McCann |
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4d09354
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Sometimes you've got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.
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Colum McCann |
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e18f608
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It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left.
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Colum McCann |
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6acb116
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And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us?
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Colum McCann |
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288ca02
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We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.
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writing
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Colum McCann |
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66b1b6e
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As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.
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Colum McCann |
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d197b89
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There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.
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Colum McCann |
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1408877
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If your life doesn't flash in front of your eyes, old boy, does that mean you've had no life at all?
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Colum McCann |
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60f5c61
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He has read whole volumes on the philosophy of nonviolence. How peace had to be understood in all its moral dimensions. The proper coexistence of all existents. The excluded middle ground. The surpassing of personality. The vanity of cultural superiority. The tension between individual conscience and collective responsibility. The need to proclaim again and again what has already been said.
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Colum McCann |
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2184ed0
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They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who'd soon turn into empty chairs.
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Colum McCann |
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f8a1f31
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Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.
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Colum McCann |
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b6e9eb1
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At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. 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 nice and you make it your own.
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Colum McCann |
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24e892c
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It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn't want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn't want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.
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Colum McCann |
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68e23eb
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We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear 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.
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Colum McCann |