Quotes from Colum McCann

photographs from the archives once: the ancient Palestinian villas on the rim of the valley. They were among the most beautiful houses Rami had ever seen. The Ottoman life. The Mandate life. The Jordanian life.

Known to Israelis as the city of Akko. Known to Palestinians still as Akka. Known beyond Israel and Palestine as Acre: a mosaic town with a low skyline of mosque and flat roof and synagogue, a town of bells and loudspeakers and muezzin calls, where the warm-water wind retreats the tongue and sneaks multiple sounds into the throat: Acre, Akko, Akka.

We, the Palestinians, became the victims of the victims

We stumble on, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

To live on in the memory of others means that you do not die.

My head against his shoulder, he laughs as if the laughter wants to travel a good distance, down through my body also.

Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid, even acid.

I will always wonder what it was, what that moment of beauty was, when he whispered it to me, when we found him smashed up in the hospital, what it was he was saying when he whispered into the dark that he had seen something he could not forget, a jumble of words, a man, a building, I could not quite make it out. I can only hope that in the last minute he was at peace.

that all good math had come from the Arabs, everyone knew that.

Rumi, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there.

Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid, even acid. 465 It disrupts the forces of attraction that hold molecules together.

She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we'd never seen.

Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.

About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.