Quotes from Colum McCann

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)

Genius is lonely.

I don't know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I'm going to get Him in the corner until He tells me the truth.

Save us from enormities whether open or hidden

Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity: General George S. Patton.

Know your enemy, know yourself.

He says to us something about being hungry and how he met his wife when he was hungry and then they crossed some border together into Austria and then she died.

It's a vast mystery to me, like it is to most New Yorkers, how this ugly lovely town became my lovely ugly town, this gorgeous rubbish heap of a place, this city of the timeless Now, with little of the style of Paris, little of the beauty of Rome, little of the history of London, and not even much of the dear dirty dereliction of my hometown, Dublin. (from My First New York)

if he fell, well, he fell—but if he survived he would become a monument, not carved in stone or encased in brass, but one of those New York monuments that made you say: Can you believe it? With an expletive. 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?

Still, an agility lurks underneath, a wiry surprise, as if he might burst away from the limp at any moment and leave it abandoned behind him.

Mine is the apartment that receives all noises, even from the basement below. For one hundred and ten dollars a month, I feel as if I live inside a radio.

Above his desk he tacked a line he remembered from the Persian poet, Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

Satyagraha: the revelation of truth and the confrontation of injustice through nonviolent means.

It was as if by taking a photo he could, at any moment, rein habit an older life - one where a body didn't droop, or hair didn't fall out, or a future didn't have to exist

The essential question that he wanted to ask Freud was if he thought it might be possible to guide the psychological development of humankind so that it became resistant to the psychoses of hate and destruction, thereby delivering civilisation from the hovering menace of war.

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.

And now I wonder what the old man remembers about her these days. Maybe nothing. Maybe silence has cured him of memory . Maybe there's an absolute vacuum in the anathema of age

Some things in life just become very clear and we don't need a reason for them at all: I knew at that moment what I'd have to do.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.

Years later, in America, I was told that Navajo Indians believed coyotes ushered in the Big Bang of the world with their song, stood on the rim of nothingness, before time, shoved their pointed muzzles in the air, and howled the world into existence at their feet. The Indians called them longdogs. The universe was etched with their howls, sound merging into sound, the beginning of all other songs.

she began quoting some poet whose name I didn't catch, a line about open doors and a single beam of sunlight that struck right to the center of the floor. Her Bronx accent threw the poem around until it seemed to fall at her feet. She looked down sadly at it, its failure, but then she said that Corrigan was full of open doors, and he and Jazzlyn would have a heck of a time of it wherever they happened to be; every single door would be open, especially the one to that castle.

We are running from our pain to our pain.

The rim of a tightening lung.

We have words but sometimes they're not enough.