Your Daily Dose of Colum McCann

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Walking was holy - it cleared the mind.

Colum McCann

[colummccann]

Choosing a favorite living novelist is like walking the plank: Inevitably you end up drowning, but at least it’s in a sea of heroes.

Colum McCann on writers via NYTimes

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I stretched wide like love.

Colum McCann

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Her politics were those of road and grass.

Colum McCann on travelers

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I am partial, still, to the recklessness if the imagination. 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 on universality and imagination

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Some people call it romantic or sentimental. I’d rather call it fighting.

Colum McCann on redemption

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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

Colum McCann on adventure

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“I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.”

Colum McCann on marriage

*And from the author of this blog: Congratulations to those who can now get married in United States. Love is triumphant this day.

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Despite the weight of evidence against human nature — we are all still capable of small moments of resurrection, no matter where we happen to be.

Colum McCann on the potential of humanity

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The true art of peace, negotiators know, lies in our ability to deal with the mighty weapon of language.

Colum McCann on peace

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So you force yourself into a position of difficulty, because it seems to me that we’ve forgotten… the excellence of difficulty… But there’s something really beautiful in the notion of difficulty.

Colum McCann on bravery

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Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine.

Colum McCann on love.

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We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.

Colum McCann on memory

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We leave in order, one day, to remember. The nostalgia slips between our rib cages and turns our hearts a few notches backward.

-Colum McCann on immigration

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This is a human victory over war, the triumph of endurance over memory.

Colum McCann on flight.

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What Obama did - and continues to do - is expand the lungs of our ongoing sense of identity.

-Colum McCann on President Barack Obama

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Random moments of beauty. They are almost enough.

Colum McCann on the year 2012.

via NY Times