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98bc81c
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Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my ..
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inspiration
inspirational
let-the-great-world-spin
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Colum McCann |
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2d9050a
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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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family
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Colum McCann |
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48d60e8
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things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.
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Colum McCann |
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55c1a3f
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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. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.
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family
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Colum McCann |
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c873799
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Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.
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Colum McCann |
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cf2fc43
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I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don't begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going.
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Colum McCann |
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3b1f704
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It (NY) was like the city that Lot left behind and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.
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Colum McCann |
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08fb1a8
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The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, take..
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ireland
slavery
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Colum McCann |
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c223ba6
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He was not beyond knowing that they thought him - when he first arrived - a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. He wasn't interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible.
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Colum McCann |
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3d4979f
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One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.
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Colum McCann |
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b7d5ea2
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She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity.
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Colum McCann |
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f690ead
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He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father's father?
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Colum McCann |
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651707c
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myn bhm w rzsh lHZt Hyt rbThy wjwd drd, hrchh lHZt mbhmtr shwnd, bhyshn bltr myrwd.
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Colum McCann |
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a30e868
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Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound.
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Colum McCann |
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92773cb
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So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.
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Colum McCann |
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45736f7
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The air felt suddenly 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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70755c6
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They say ol' man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He's the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.
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risk
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Colum McCann |
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7817e68
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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
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Colum McCann |
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5beed92
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The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, have become it.
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Colum McCann |
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aa08536
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He was the son of his son--he was here, he was left behind.
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Colum McCann |
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2ffd3a4
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Wenn wir gehen, nehmen wir unsere Heimat mit.
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Colum McCann |
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3c3cad4
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That he'd see the light and it'd still be in a tunnel.
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Colum McCann |
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05cb09b
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It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty.
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Colum McCann |
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770405b
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m chh chyzy bh frzndnmn mydhym jz yn qblyt khh mthl m nshwnd?
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Colum McCann |
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2430cb4
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Recklessness and freedom - how did they become a cocktail?
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Colum McCann |
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8bad8eb
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Bits of it floating in the air, he said. "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 and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we s..
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Colum McCann |
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6b5d763
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The quiet lines matter as much as the noisy ones.
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writing
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Colum McCann |
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a16f7a0
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I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me.
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Colum McCann |
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8a2a1e2
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To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn't a hippie idea. Both of us always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from hippies. We were the edge, the definers.
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Colum McCann |
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8ea7176
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I'm not God. --Then find someone who is, man.
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Colum McCann |
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510990d
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The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don't go.
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Colum McCann |
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04aefee
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He could be in any mood or any place and, unbidden, it returned.
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Colum McCann |
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5c70b3c
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I have nobody left to whom I can tell the story.
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Colum McCann |
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a23790e
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Goliama chast ot vremeto si prekarva taka: predstavia si kakvo bi kazala, bez vs'shchnost da go kazva.
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Colum McCann |
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0822610
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Prekrasen den. Potapiakha kraka v shchastieto i ne biakha gotovi da gi izvadiat. Khv'rliakha klechki v'v vodnite v'rtopcheta i gi nabliudavakha kak se izgubvat. Postelikha si odeialo i iadokha sandvichi. Po-k'sno sestra i se razplaka vnezapno, kato promiana v'v vremeto, niamashe druga prichina osven izpukvaneto na tapata ot vinoto. Dzheizlin i podade salfetka. Gloriia se razsmia i im kaza, che mnogo otdavna e otv'd skr'bta i i e omr'znalo v..
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Colum McCann |
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ebc93f6
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She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn't interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazzlyn was too. They were like strangers on a porch, Gloria and Jazzlyn, with the evening sun going down: they just sat there together and neither could say what the other one knew, so they just kept quiet, and watched the day descend. One of them..
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Colum McCann |
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81e1fe4
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Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water.
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Colum McCann |
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63acf21
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His theme was happiness--what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.
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Colum McCann |
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2c2a8be
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It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.
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Colum McCann |
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c733a7c
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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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346914d
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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e772999
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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.
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Colum McCann |
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fbd009e
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We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
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god
sentiment
serendipity
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Colum McCann |
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e8d7cba
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We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here.
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peace
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Colum McCann |