Quotes from Colum McCann

Israeli Defense Force Order 101, Regarding Prohibition of Incitement and Hostile Propaganda Actions, was put into effect in 1967. It forbade Palestinians to use the word Palestine in official documents, to depict or raise or fly their flag, or to make any sort of art that combined the colors of the traditional flag.

Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow

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.

The men all seemed to want mulligans with their lives.

Amicable numbers are two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together—not including the original number itself—the sums of their divisors equal each other. The numbers—esteemed by mathematicians—are considered amicable because the proper divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110 which, when added together, reach 284. And the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71 and 142, of which the sum is 220.

A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle.

In their familiarity, they had developed a dislike for each other.

When you come into a rich man's house, the only place to split is in his face.

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

Further along, one of Picasso's doves of peace with an Armalite, not an olive branch, in its mouth.

How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.

All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.

you soon find out how loud the silence really is. everything unsaid leads eventually to what is said.

The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That's where the camera came in. It was the unspoken thing between him and the others.

There was a quote about standing in a river too long or long enough that I can't find now. Anyone remember? If so, what page?

Once I thought we could never solve our conflict, we would continue hating each other forever, but it is not written anywhere that we have to go on killing each other. The hero makes a friend of his enemy. That's my duty. Don't thank me for doing it. That's all it is, my duty. When they killed my daughter they killed my fear. I can do anything now.

A priest? I said. --A monk or some such. One of those worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis. --Theologian, said the other. --One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare.

Ullmann had once written that the secret of every work of art was the annihilation of matter through form.

So, leave the cynics be. Out-cynic them. Step into that elsewhere. Believe that your story is bigger than yourself. In

while the others--those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther--felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky.

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.

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 said good night, while the other waited.

So many people considered Rami a traitor, a lackey, a turncoat, but in the end he didn't care: he knew what he was doing, he knew he was getting under their skin, he was peeling it back, exposing the rawness. He was outnumbered, yes, but they would find a tipping point sometime, somewhere, along the way. It was inevitable. He had to keep telling the story. Repeating it again and again and again.

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