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.
Colum McCannThe essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.
Colum McCannHe has read whole volumes on the philosophy of nonviolence. How peace had to be understood in all its moral dimensions. The proper coexistence of all existents. The excluded middle ground. The surpassing of personality. The vanity of cultural superiority. The tension between individual conscience and collective responsibility. The need to proclaim again and again what has already been said.
Colum McCannThe luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
Colum McCannTag: vanity
It's hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light. The problem is that the images that so often return to me are seldom those I want.
Colum McCannSome days he wishes that he could simply empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow--not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes.
Colum McCannHe was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.
Colum McCannCynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCannWhat was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves if incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other.
Colum McCannTag: life
It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.
Colum McCannTag: life-and-living youth-age
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