We seldom know what were hearing when we hear something for the first — Colum McCann

"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."

"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."