Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

“All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.” —Aleksandar Hemon, THE LAZARUS PROJECT

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties.

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.

“With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”

We seldom know what we’re 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.

The sunset was the color of muscle, pink and striated gray.

Pain’s what you give, not what you get.”

Family is like water—it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

loneliness. It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

All this talk of freedom. Nonsense, really. Freedom can’t be given, it must be received.

The wind made the reeds gossip.

Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.

That, he said, was the funny thing about memory. It came along at the oddest moments.

A few men with fewer teeth sat at the counter, listening to a baseball game on the radio.

There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.

NOBODY FALLS HALFWAY.

Genius, they called it. But it was only genius if you thought of it first.

Genius is lonely.

I don’t know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I’m going to get Him in the corner until He tells me the truth.

At the end of the world they’re gonna have cockroaches and Barry Manilow records,

he was surprised to find that there were edges beneath his own edge.

Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present.

He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind.

A condition of youth, your own importance.

—What is it about wine, Harry? —What d’ya mean? —What is it that cures us? —Made to glorify the gods. And dull the idiots. Here, have a little more.

Recklessness and freedom—how did they become a cocktail?

A man’s beard is a weather line: an intersperse of light and dark, a flurry of gray at the chin, a dark hollow beneath his lip.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled.

The days I recall finest were about as ordinary as they come—playing

I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don’t begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time—but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

what America didn’t realize was that it was forever censored, forever would be, unless common rights were changed. They were the words he used instead of civil rights: common rights.

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.

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

The streets of Harlem felt like they were under siege—fences and ramps and barbed wire, radios in the windows, kids out on the sidewalks. Up in the high windows women leaned out on their elbows like they were looking back into a better decade.

She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours.

Readers interested in Petit’s walk should go to his book To Reach the Clouds (Faber and Faber, 2002) for an intimate account.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

The fact of the matter is that there are many hands tapping the writer’s keyboard.