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“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”
-- Colum McCann
#Inspirational #World #Chaos
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“I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.”
-- Colum McCann
#Optimism #Darkness #Sometimes
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“The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.”
-- Colum McCann
#Beautiful #Love Is #Alive
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“I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.”
-- Colum McCann
#Writing
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“Long ago, long ago. 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.”
-- Colum McCann
#Heart #Simple #Long
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“Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.”
-- Colum McCann
#Mistake #Moving #Pride
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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.”
-- Colum McCann
#Memories #Water #Trying
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“It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.”
-- Colum McCann
#Beautiful #Silence #Awful
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“We have to admire the world for not ending on us.”
-- Colum McCann
#World #Admire
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“I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.”
-- Colum McCann
#Real #Thinking #Doors
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“There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.”
-- Colum McCann
#Thinking #Goes On
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“The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.”
-- Colum McCann
#Home #Dark #Tunnels
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“She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.”
-- Colum McCann
#New York #Moments #Landing
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“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.”
-- Colum McCann
#Tired #Grieving #Heaven
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“What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday...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.”
-- Colum McCann
#Real #Light #Darkness
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“Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”
-- Colum McCann
#People #Matter #Sentimental
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“Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.”
-- Colum McCann
#Long #Giving #Alive
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“Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.”
-- Colum McCann
#Fiction #Alive #Body
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“There are no days more full than those we go back to.”
-- Colum McCann
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“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
-- Colum McCann
#Stories #Literature #Life Is
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“I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.”
-- Colum McCann
#Said
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“If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.”
-- Colum McCann
#Should #Stills
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“You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11.”
-- Colum McCann
#Thinking #World #Trade
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“Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.”
-- Colum McCann
#Important #Illusion #Possibility
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“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.”
-- Colum McCann
#People #Perfect #Half
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“He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.”
-- Colum McCann
#Heart #Care #Might
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“Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.”
-- Colum McCann
#Sometimes #Function
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“You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven...”
-- Colum McCann
#Math #Heaven #Cost
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“We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.”
-- Colum McCann
#Thinking #Silence #Ongoing
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“No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.”
-- Colum McCann
#Loneliness #Trying #World
