TransAtlantic

by Colum McCann

She pauses as if she has just propped a number of stray words on the tip of her tongue, odd little things with no flow to them at all, no way to get them out. She stands, balancing them, wondering if they will topple.

There were sixty-one children born in Northern Ireland the day Andrew was born. Sixty-one ways for a life to unfold.

They tried, he and his first wife, they hung on, they failed, what was broken was broken. Ashes do not become wood.

The air itself seemed to have already drunk several glasses of gin.

She had spent many years trying to carve out a place for herself, but she was so much older now, tired enough to wonder why it mattered.

She wondered if a part of her had fallen ill precisely because she wanted to dwell for a while longer in the presence of her daughter. The desire not to lose her. To keep her nearby. To live inside that alternative skin.

It was odd to Emily how life could be so very expansive and still return to the elements of childhood.

In every pocket he carries pencils and pads of paper, crumbs of yesterday and tomorrow.

There are times—months later, years later, a decade later even—that it strikes Lottie how very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.

I have a fair idea, but it hardly matters anymore. Our ancient hatreds don’t deserve capital letters.

It’s hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light.

I am not of the opinion that we become empty chairs, but we certainly end up making room for others along the way.

The men all seemed to want mulligans with their lives.

We were all young once: my mother used to say we should make sure to drink the wine before it turns.

I had the unpleasant sensation that my life was circling around again, only I was even more unequipped for it than ever.

My life and my house didn’t seem a conceit to me at all: it was an actual, breathing place where gulls dropped shells from on high, and where the doors had to be closed to keep in the heat, and where the ghosts had to duck their heads when they walked through the low rooms.

Why had the letter been kept in the first place? The things we put away most carefully in a drawer might very well be the things we will never, again, find.

There’s only so much embarrassment we can bear.

The conspiracy of women. We are in it together, make no mistake.

I had known, but did not want to be told. I had to feign a quick happiness: rosin on the bow seconds after the violin has been smashed.

Lord knows, you can’t grow this old without looking for others to shoulder our burdens.

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

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

The past got up and shook itself loose.

I’d allowed things to dissolve. All of it of my own making. Reckless. Sunken. Fearful.

What mystery we lose when we figure things out, but perhaps there’s a mystery in the obvious, too.

There isn’t a story in the world that isn’t in part, at least, addressed to the past.

When I sat down beside them, their silence was lined with tenderness. We have to admire the world for not ending on us.