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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f6c118e | Sooner or later they all turn their backs. They all leave. That's gospel. I've been there. I've seen it. They all do. | Colum McCann | ||
| 9732fdb | His face had softened: as if just being a moment with her had relaxed him, allowed him to be someone different. 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. | Colum McCann | ||
| 51d03d6 | Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change. | Colum McCann | ||
| b9fe80a | He glanced up in my direction and I froze. Quickly I turned away. 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. | Colum McCann | ||
| 0296bdb | Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get. | Colum McCann | ||
| ed28767 | There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past. I | Colum McCann | ||
| d05c0ad | Most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick. One was a lawyer, a tall, fat sandy-haired man. He lorded it over the others by buying them drinks. They clinked glasses with him and called him a 'motherfucking ambulance chaser' when he went to the bathroom. It was not a series of words they would have used at home -- motherfucking ambulance chasers weren't big in the old country -- but they said it as often as they could. With great hil.. | Colum McCann | ||
| e764775 | They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples. | Colum McCann | ||
| 44ce35d | Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell. | Colum McCann | ||
| fe2ed57 | How far from real the truth is. I wanted then to take every murdering bastard in Northern Ireland, and have them sleep for a night in my boy's blue rowboat, out on the lough, in the dark, among the reeds, turning in primal celtic patterns. | Colum McCann | ||
| d4e13f7 | He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted--it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his fingers | Colum McCann | ||
| 2e0cc11 | She expected no judgement and wanted no pity. | pity | Colum McCann | |
| 3c1012a | When a great truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. | Colum McCann | ||
| beb6ac3 | They will have to live with it for the rest of the trip now, but Alcock knows how the engine roar can make a pilot fall asleep, that the rhythm can lull a man into nodding off before he hits the waves. It is fierce work--he can feel the machine in his muscles. The sheer tug through his body. The exhaustion of the mind. Always avoiding cloud. Always looking for a line of sight. Creating any horizon possible. The brain inventing phantom turns.. | Colum McCann | ||
| d10aa8d | We have always absorbed our own disintegration. | Colum McCann | ||
| 53a06d3 | In their familiarity, they had developed a dislike for each other. | Colum McCann | ||
| b40557e | He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground. | Colum McCann | ||
| 719f019 | The wind surged in a roar, then died down like it was pondering some heavy shit, then started back up like before. | Colum McCann | ||
| ef68e4b | He took a trip ... up to ... Elliott's house, his mansion rather. Awful place, twelve bedrooms and swimming pool and media hall and five car garage, but cheap and shoddy all the same, like the one next door and next door to that. A row of Ikea houses, such wealthy mediocrity. His very own son. His big, bald son. Who could believe it. The bigness, the baldness, the stupidity. In a house designed to bore the daylight out of visitors, no chara.. | Colum McCann | ||
| 250b0c7 | ah, khwd dhhn ykh chh bsyr `myq st, mr pyyn bbr w bgdhr ab r lms khnm. | Colum McCann | ||
| da2d5e6 | frznd hmyshh khwdkh nmymnd m mdr hmyshh mdr st. | Colum McCann | ||
| 91595f9 | When a great truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. She could see an orchestra in him, a whole range of instruments and sound. His voice was loud and booming. It is bound to go on until it becomes the thought of the world. | Colum McCann | ||
| 100d603 | She wanted to tell him so much, 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. | colum-mccann let-the-great-world-spin life | Colum McCann | |
| b85e040 | That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past. | Colum McCann | ||
| 5633ef5 | At the end of the letter he said, Fuck you, you heartless bitch, you rolled up my heart and squeezed it dry. Still, when I recalled him I would always see him waiting for me under the silver high school bleachers with a smile on his face and thirty-two perfect shining white teeth. | Colum McCann | ||
| 2ba8654 | In Florida, her father had once said at dinner: "I like Negroes, yessir. I think everyone should own one". She had stormed from the table and stayed in her room for two days. Her dinner was slid under the door. Well, not slid under. Handed around the doorknob. Seventeen and about to go off to college. "Tell Daddy I'm not coming out until he apologizes". And he did. Clomped up the curving staircase. Held her in his big round southern arms an.. | Colum McCann | ||
| 69f03c0 | Mornings in the kitchen, afternoons in the counseling room, evenings out combing streets of half-lamplight: Hermann Park, Montrose, Sunnyside, Hiram Clarke, the Fifth Ward. | Colum McCann | ||
| b6c5408 | Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. | order poverty simple simplification | Colum McCann | |
| 9068ad7 | So many things are unexplainable, and how is it that we know a life, except that we know our own, and it is brought into focus by the death of those around us." (less)" | Colum McCann | ||
| f6d636a | A good doctor. He would not let her take pills. Try each day just to laugh a little bit, it's a good medicine, he said. Pills were a second option. I should have taken them. No. Better off to try laughing. Die laughing. | Colum McCann | ||
| 4402bf4 | not many follicles among the oracles. | Colum McCann | ||
| 1e89ffb | How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes. | Colum McCann | ||
| 49fa3fe | 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. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for | Colum McCann | ||
| ea253e6 | 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 | Colum McCann | ||
| 9daeb0a | Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. | Colum McCann | ||
| a5d7a67 | nwyd armsh byshtr z mkhft zndgy dwm myawrd. | زندگی | Colum McCann | |
| 5231bb6 | She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father's cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had alway.. | Colum McCann | ||
| 5fdcc66 | They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead. | privilege | Colum McCann | |
| 7f65729 | banging saucepans to ring in the new year? | Colum McCann | ||
| 3d11251 | The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away, like an ancient word stepping off a page. | Colum McCann | ||
| acfc4ef | She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours. | Colum McCann | ||
| cfd4720 | If you start forgetting you're already lost. | Colum McCann | ||
| 51d01d7 | Sure, I ached for the backroads of my hometown in Missouri, but leaving behind a scholarship would've been a defeat for my folks, who had no idea what it was like for me--they who thought their little girl was up north learning the truth of America in the sort of place where a young woman could cross the thresholds of the rich. They told me that my southern charm would get me by. My father wrote letters that began: My Little Glorious. I wro.. | Colum McCann | ||
| 44f19ce | tmm jngh, hr jngy, Hmqt byHdwmrz nsn r myrsnd. | حماقت جنگ | Colum McCann |