Colum McCann

"You know, when youre young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you cant hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again."

"Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasnt much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar."

"There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure its the last well ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times."

"A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark youd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can."

"It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness of the throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing. This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance."

"The theater began shortly after lunch. His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. 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."

"I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it."

"People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time - but even on the best day nobodys perfect."

"Sometimes we walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but its not a coat at all, its more like another skin."

"Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance."

"Everything had purpose, signal, meaning."

"We seldom know what were 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 it really was, what it meant."