"She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldnt look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple - hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat."
Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and currently resides in New York. Awards he has won include the U.S. National Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, and his work has been published in over 40 languages as well as being published in many American and international publications. He also is the co-founder and president of Narrativ
"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."
"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."