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I Know Already That I Will Return To This Day Whenever I Want To. I Can Bid It Alive. Preserve It. There Is A Still Point Where The Present, The Now, Winds Around Itself, And Nothing Is Tangled. The River Is Not Where It Begins Or Ends, But Right In The Middle Point, Anchored By What Has Happened And What Is To Arrive.

-Colum McCann

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I Know Already That

Colum McCann

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I Know Already That I Will Return To This Day Whenever I Want To. I Can Bid It Alive. Preserve It. There Is A Still Point Where The Present, The Now, Winds Around Itself, And Nothing Is Tangled. The River Is Not Where It Begins Or Ends, But Right In The Middle Point, Anchored By What Has Happened And What Is To Arrive.

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I Guess This Is What Marriage Is, Or Was, Or Could Be. You Drop The Mask. You Allow The Fatigue In. You Lean Across And Kiss The Years Because They're The Things That Matter.

There Are No Days More Full Than Those We Go Back To.

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Everything Was Fabulous, Even Our Breakdowns.

Memory Has A Heavy Backspin, Yet It’s Still Impossible To Land Exactly Where We Took Off.

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.

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He Felt For A Moment Uncreated. Another Kind Of Awake.

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I Have Different Books For Different Times Of The Day, Let Alone Different Seasons Of The Year!

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I Was Fascinated By The Lack Of A Word For A Parent Who Has Lost A Child. We Have No Word In English. I Thought For Sure There'd Be A Word In Irish But There Is None. And Then I Looked In Several Other Languages And Could Not Find One, Until I Found The Word Sh'khol In Hebrew. I'm Still Not Sure Why So Many Languages Don't Have A Word For This Sort Of Bereavement, This Shadowing.

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There Are Moments We Return To, Now And Always. Family Is Like Water - It Has A Memory Of What It Once Filled, Always Trying To Get Back To The Original Stream.

With All Respects To Heaven, I Like It Here.

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And I Suddenly Think, As I Look Across The Table At Him, That These Are The Days As They Will Be. This Is The Future As We See It. The Swerve And The Static. The Confidence And The Doubt.

Where Happiness Was Not A Possibility, The Illusion Of It Was Always More Important.

He Might Have Been Naive, But He Didn't Care; He Said He's Rather Die With His Heart On His Sleeve Than End Up Another Cynic.

The Tunnels Of Our Lives Connect, Coming To Daylight At The Oddest Moments, And Then Plunge Us Into The Dark Again. We Return To The Lives Of Those Who Have Gone Before Us, A Perplexing Möbius Strip Until We Come Home, Eventually, To Ourselves.

What Was A Life Anyway? An Accumulation Of Small Shelves Of Incident.

Even If People Laughed At The Notion Of Goodness, If They Found It Sentimental, Or Nostalgic, It Didn't Matter -- It Was None Of Those Things, He Said, And It Had To Be Fought For.

I'm A Complete And Utter Fiction. Then Again, We All Are.

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Pain's Nothing. Pain's What You Give, Not What You Get.

We Have To Listen To Other People's Stories. That's The Thing. And That's The Only Way That We Eventually Get To Know Ourselves.

Words Are Good For Saying What Things Are, But Sometimes They Don't Function For What Things Aren't.

The Irish Are Great For Their Tunes, But All Their Lovesongs Are Sad And Their Warsongs Happy.

The Person We Know At First, She Thinks, Is Not The One We Know At Last.

You Cannot Read Any Image Of The World Trade Center Without Thinking Of 9/11.

Long Ago, Long Ago. 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.

Goodness Was More Difficult Than Evil. Evil Men Knew That More Than Good Men. That's Why They Became Evil. That's Why It Stuck With Them. Evil Was For Those Who Could Never Reach The Truth. It Was A Mask For Stupidity And Lack Of Love. Even If People Laughed At The Notion Of Goodness, If They Found It Sentimental, Or Nostalgic, It Didn't Matter -- It Was None Of Those Things, He Said, And It Had To Be Fought For.

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 Really Was, What It Meant.

It Was A Silence That Heard Itself, Awful And Beautiful.

...and It Strikes Her, As She Walks, That Borders, Like Hatred, Are Exaggerated Precisely Because Otherwise They Would Cease To Exist Altogether.

I Love Short Stories. They're Like Small Imploding Universes. They Are Very Tightly Bound And Controlled. I'd Been Wanting To Write One For Ages But Just Got Tangled Up In Novels. The Novel Is The Same In The Sense That It Is Also A Universe, But It Explodes Outwards With All That Shrapnel Going In Several Different Directions. I Don't See Too Much Difference In The Forms Except For The Fact That Writing Short Stories Is Like Sprinting Rather Than Long-distance Running.

She Was Forever Tilted Sideways By The Notion That Pain Was Inevitable, Chance Was Cruel, And All Human Ingenuity Should Go Towards The Making Of A Good Cup Of Tea.

If You Have A Structure Beforehand, You're Sort Of Stuffing Your Story Into A Pre-assembled Box. You Don't Want That To Happen. What You Want In Your Writing Is To Have A Sort Of Wildness That Occurs. And Then, Out Of The Wildness, A Structure Emerges.

I Told Him That I Loved Him And That I'd Always Love Him And I Felt Like A Child Who Throws A Centavo Into A Fountain And Then She Has To Tell Someone Her Most Extraordinary Wish Even Though She Knows That The Wish Should Be Kept Secret And That, In Telling It, She Is Quite Probably Losing It. He Replied That I Was Not To Worry, That The Penny Could Come Out Of The Fountain Again And Again And Again.

He's At Ease, His Body Sculpted To The Music, His Shoulder Searching The Other Shoulder, His Right Toe Knowing The Left Knee, The Height, The Depth, The Form, The Control, The Twist Of His Wrist, The Bend Of His Elbow, The Tilt Of His Neck, Notes Digging Into Arteries, And He Is In The Air Now, Forcing The Legs Up Beyond Muscular Memory, One Last Press Of The Thighs, An Elongation Of Form, A Loosening Of Human Contour, He Goes Higher And Is Skyheld.

He Said To Me Once That Most Of The Time People Use The Word Love As Just Another Way To Show Off They're Hungry. The Way He Said It Went Something Like: Glorify Their Appetites.

Ultimately, You Can Only Ever Write What You Know. It's Logically And Philosophically Impossible To Write What You Don't Know.

If You Sort Of See Yourself Writing Into A Space That You Don't Always Recognize, You Sometimes Learn Things That You Knew, But Weren't Entirely Aware Of. It's Very Liberating For A Writer To Go Into A Space Where She Or He Has Not Gone Before, Because, Instead Of Being A Tourist, You're Like An Explorer Now, And You're Sort Of Lost In This New Idea.

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.

Increasingly I Think Of Myself As Some Strange And Solitary Conductor, Introduced To A Group Of Very Dynamic Musicians Who Happen To Be My Characters, And I Have No Idea How They Are Going To Play Together, And I Have Certainly No Idea How I Am Going To Put Manners On Them.

I Sit There Thinking About How Much Courage It Takes To Live An Ordinary Life.

The Contemporary American Novelist Benefits In A Way From Being Ignored. It Makes You Angrier And Makes You Want To Go Into All Of Those Places Where You Shouldnt.

What Corrigan Wanted Was A Fully Believable God, One You Could Find In The Grime Of The Everyday... 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. He Wanted, Quite Simply, For The World To Be A Better Place, And He Was In The Habit Of Hoping For It.

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I Write Articles, And I Do Profiles Of Members Of Organizations And Associations.

That's What Sons Do: Write To Their Mothers About Recall, Tell Themselves About The Past Until They Come To Realize That They Are The Past.

Every Man With His Own Peculiar Vice. His Will Hardly Rock Heaven Or Hell.

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