Colum McCann

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear 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.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it__ still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.

That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.

We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.

Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It__ all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.