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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.

-Colum McCann

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We Seldom Know What

Colum McCann

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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.

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Let This Be A Lesson To Us All, Said The Preacher. You Will Be Walking Someday In The Dark And The Truth Will Come Shining Through, And Behind You Will Be A Life That You Never Want To See Again.

He Looks Like The Sort Of Man Who Can't Afford To Leave, And Doesn't Want To Stay, And So He Is Doing Both At Once.

People Think They Know The Mystery Of Living In Your Skin. They Don't. There's No One Who Knows Except The Person Who Carts It Around Her Own Self.

A Book Is Completed Only When It Is Finished By A Reader.

Pain Is Not Wat You Get, It Is Wat You Give.

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.

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

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.

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 Realized That He Had Thought Only About The First Step, Never Imagined The Last.

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.

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

Good Days, They Come Around The Oddest Corners.

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

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.

Corrigan Told Me Once That Christ Was Quite Easy To Understand. He Went Where He Was Supposed To Go. He Stayed Where He Was Needed. He Took Little Or Nothing Along, A Pair Of Sandals, A Bit Of A Shirt, A Few Odds And Ends To Stave Off The Loneliness. He Never Rejected The World. If He Had Rejected It, He Would Have Been Rejecting Mystery. And If He Rejected Mystery, He Would Have Been Rejecting Faith.

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.

The Luxury Of Age Was The Giving Up Of Vanity.

Things In Life Have No Real Beginning, Though Our Stories About Them Always Do.

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

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.

We Have To Admire The World For Not Ending On Us.

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

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

I Have The Most Charmed, Most - I Feel Entirely Blessed And Lucky That I Have The Life That I Have.

It Struck Me That Distant Cities Are Designed Precisely So You Can Know Where You Came From.

I Think A Good Novel Can Be A Doorstop To Despair. I Also Think The Real Bravery Comes With Those Who Prepared To Go Through That Door And Look At The World In All Its Grime And Torment, And Still Find Something Of Value, No Matter How Small.

Women Get The Short Shrift In History. It's Been Largely Written And Dictated By Men, Or At Least Men Believe That We Own It, And Women Have Really Been In Those Quieter Moments At The Edge Of History. But, Really, They're The Ones Who Are Turning The Cogs And The Wheels And Allowing Things Like The Peace Process To Happen.

I Am Of The Opinion, And Even More So The Older I Get, That It Is More Difficult To Have Hope Than It Is To Despair. And I Mean This In The Sense That In Order To Have Hope You Must Acknowledge The Despair And Then You Have To Get Beyond It. Taken From A Radio Interview Given On Bbc Radio 4's Open Book

A Lot Of People Think That Writers Are Much Cleverer Than They Actually Are. No, They're Not. But They're Emotionally Clever, And They Go Into A Character, And They Feel Something That They Weren't Entirely Aware Of Beforehand.

She Likes The People With The Endurance To Tolerate The Drudge, The Ones Who Know That Pain Is A Requirement, Not A Curse.

Stories Are The Best Democracy We Have. We Are Allowed To Become The Other We Never Dreamed We Could Be.

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

Everything Was Fabulous, Even Our Breakdowns.

I Grew Up Sort Of Middle Class, Safe And Suburban.

Life Must Pass Through Difficulty In Order To Achieve Any Modicum Of Beauty.

Stories Are There To Be Told, And Each Story Changes With The Telling. Time Changes Them. Logic Changes Them. Grammar Changes Them. History Changes Them. Each Story Is Shifted Side-ways By Each Day That Unfolds. Nothing Ends. The Only Thing That Matters, As Faulkner Once Put It, Is The Human Heart In Conflict With Itself. At The Heart Of All This Is The Possibility, Or Desire, To Create A Piece Of Art That Talks To The Human Instinct For Recovery And Joy.

The War Was About Vanity, He Said. It Was About Old Men Who Couldn't Look In The Mirror Anymore And So They Sent The Young Out To Die. Was Was A Get-together Of The Vain. They Wanted It Simple--hate Your Enemy, Know Nothing Of Him.

...it Was Necessary To Love Silence, But Before You Could Love Silence You Had To Have Noise.

If They Ask You To Stand Still, You Should Dance.

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.

Novels Are More Difficult Simply Because They Are Longer And Require More Juggling, But Short Stories Are Closer To Perfection, If You Can Get The Language Right.

Give Life Long Enough And It Will Solve All Your Problems, Including The One Of Being Alive.

It Had Never Occurred To Me Before But Everything In New York Is Built Upon Another Thing, Nothing Is Entirely By Itself, Each Thing As Strange As The Last, And Connected.

It Is Not Fashionable Anymore, I Suppose, To Have A Regard For One's Mother In The Way My Brother And I Had Then, In The Mid-1950s, When The Noise Outside The Window Was Mostly Wind And Sea Chime.

There's A Part Of Me That Thinks Perhaps We Go On Existing In A Place Even After We've Left It.

The City Was Bigger Than Its Buildings, Bigger Than Its Inhabitants Too. It Had Its Own Nuances. It Accepted Whatever Came Its Way, The Crime And The Violence And The Little Shocks Of Good That Crawled Out From Underneath The Everyday.

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 Not Interested In Blind Optimism, But I’m Very Interested In Optimism That Is Hard-won, That Takes On Darkness And Then Says, ‘this Is Not Enough.’ But It Takes Time, More Time Than We Can Sometimes Imagine, To Get There. And Sometimes We Don’t.

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.

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.

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.

Literature Can Remind Us That Not All Life Is Already Written Down: There Are Still So Many Stories To Be Told.

He Told Me Once That There Was No Better Faith Than A Wounded Faith And Sometimes I Wonder If That Is What He Was Doing All Along --trying To Wound His Faith In Order To Test It--and I Was Just Another Stone In The Way Of His God.

I'm Of The Opinion That The Real Is Imagined And The Imagined Is Quite Real. The Real Is Imagined, In The Sense That We Shape Our Stories, So Anything That Even Happens On The News Gets Shaped In A Certain Way And Gets A Texture, And That The Imagined Can Be Real.

With All Respects To Heaven, I Like It Here.

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.

Whatever You Say

So Much Of Her Time Spent Like This: Dreaming Up Things To Say And Never Quite Saying Them.

About 25 Years Ago, I Took A Bicycle Across The United States. I Soon Found Out That The Greatest Item Of Clothing Was The Trusty Bandanna. There Were Dozens Of Uses For A Bandanna - As A Pot Holder, A Chain Cleaner, A Sun Shield, A Headband, A Snot Rag, A Declaration Of Kerouacian Intent.

One Look At Each Other And It Was Immediately Understood That They Both Needed A Clean Slate,,, The Obliteration Of Memory.

The Job Of The Writer Is To Look At Where He Is Now And Make Some Sort Of Emotional Sense Of It, Not Only For That Moment But For Years To Come.

There Is Always Room For At Least Two Truths.

The Essence Of Intelligence Was To Know When, Or If, To Expose Even The Heart's Deep Need For Instruction.

The Repeated Lies Become History, But They Don't Necessarily Become The Truth.

I Want The Younger Writer To Know That She Or He Is Meaningful, That What They Have To Say Is Powerful In This World. But They Can't Come Indoors, They Can't Close The Curtains, They Can't, Like, Lock Themselves Away From The World And Say Nothing.

I Don't Know Of A Greater Privilege Than Being Allowed To Tell A Story, Or To Listen To A Story. They're The Only Thing We Have That Can Trump Life Itself.

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.

I'm Only Telling You On The Truth," He Said. "if You Can't Stand The Truth, Don't Ask For It.

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

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

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

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

We Stumble On, Thinks Jaslyn, Bring A Little Noise Into The Silence, Find In Others The Ongoing Of Ourselves. It Is Almost Enough.

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.

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.

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.

Let It Be. Silly Song, Really. You Let It Be, It Returns. There's The Truth. You Let It Be, It Drags You To The Ground. You Let It Be, It Crawls Up Your Walls.

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

Anakana Schofield Is Part Of A New Wave Of Wonderful Irish Fiction-international In Scope And Electrically Alive.

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

Téa Obreht Is The Most Thrilling Literary Discovery In Years

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.

He Didn't Like It All That Much When He First Came - All The Rubbish And The Rush - But It Was Growing On Him, It Wasn't Half Bad. Coming To The City Was Like Entering A Tunnel, He Said, And Finding To Your Surprise That The Light At The End Didn't Matter; Sometimes In Fact The Tunnel Made The Light Tolerable.

The Real Beauty In Life Is That Beauty Can Sometimes Occur.

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.

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.

Sometimes We Just Walk Into Something That Is Not For Us At All. We Pretend It Is. We Think We Can Shrug It Off Like A Coat, But It's Not A Coat At All, It's More Like Another Skin. [...] All I Wanted Was To Make My Life Thrilling For A While: To Take The Oridinary Objects Of My Days And Make A Different Argument Out Of Them, No Obligations To My Past.

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

I Think It Is Our Job, As Writers, To Be Epic. Epic And Tiny At The Same Time. If You're Going To Be A Fiction Writer, Why Not Take On Something That Means Something. In Doing This, You Must Understand That Within That Epic Structure It Is The Tiny Story That Is Possibly More Important.

I Don't Really Know What An Adverb Is. A Dangling Participle? That Sounds Really Rude. I Don't Know What Character Is, Really. Plot Seems Vaguely Juvenile To Me. It's All About Language, It's All About How You Apply It To The Page.

Sometimes Thinking Back On Things Is A Mistake Arising Out Of Pride, But I Guess You Live Inside A Moment For Years, Move With It And Feel It Grow, And It Sends Out Roots Until It Touches Everything In Sight.

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

The World Does Not Turn Without Moments Of Grace. Who Cares How Small.

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.

The Point Of Flight. To Get Rid Of Oneself. That Was Reason Enough To Fly.

I Think One Of The Biggest Political Failures, And The Biggest Social Failures, Over The Past Few Years Has Been The Failure Of Empathy; Not Being Able To Look At The Other Person Down The Street.

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.

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.

Even If You're Going To Die, You Might As Well Die Pretty.

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.

How Inevitable It Is; We Step Into An Ordinary Moment And Never Come Out Again.

Sometimes, In Life, Nothing Happens. But, Sometimes, Nothing Happens Beautifully.

Sometimes In Life

The Stars Looked Like Nail Heads In The Sky--pull A Few Of Them Out And The Darkness Would Fall.

That Was The Sort Of Everyday Love I Had To Learn To Contend With: If You Grow Up With It, It's Hard To Think You'll Ever Match It. I Used To Think It Was Difficult For Children Of Folks Who Really Loved Each Other, Hard To Get Out From Under That Skin Because Sometimes It's Just So Comfortable You Don't Want To Have To Develop Your Own.

She Wanted To Tell Him So Mach, 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.

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.

One Small Cloud, Cast Out By The Herd, Limps Away To The West.

You Can Count The Dead, But You Can't Count The Cost. We've Got No Math For Heaven.

I Gave Them All The Truth And None Of The Honesty.

Yet She Likes Complications. She Wishes She Could Turn And Say: I Like People Who Unbalance Me.

Personally, I Like The Social Novel. I Like Writing That Gets In And Under The Hood And Looks About - At What's Going On. But I Don't Say To Any Writer That That's Absolutely What They Should Do.

She Takes Another Long Haul, Lets The Smoke Settle In Her Lungs-- She Has Heard Somewhere That Cigarettes Are Good For Grief. One Long Drag And You Forget How To Cry. The Body Too Busy Dealing With The Poison.

We Shape Ourselves By Our Imaginative Reach.

Part Of Me Really Wants To Believe That Hope Is Entirely Available To All Of Us. We Don't Have To Embrace It. It Would Be Sentimental And Silly To Say That We All Need It, But It Is Absolutely Available To All Of Us.

Part Of The Beauty Of Fiction Is That We Come Alive In A Body That We Don't Own.

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

She's Always Thought That One Of The Beauties Of New York Is That You Can Be From Anywhere And Within Moments Of Landing Its Yours.

I Think The Northern Ireland Accent Is One Of The Most Beautiful In The World.

The World Spins. We Stumble On. It Is Enough.

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

Cynicism Is Easy. An Optimist Is A Braver Cynic.

Whenever Summer Rolls Around I Begin To Realize That I'm A Complete And Utter Book Snob. In Relation To Reading, I Have Absolutely No Guilty Pleasures At All. No Graphic Novels. No Murder Mysteries. My Summer Read Is Really No Different From My Winter Read. I Know Many Bookshops And Magazines Would Have Me Believe That Our Summer Forays Are Different, But Literature Is Literature, And Unfortunately Snobbery Is Snobbery.

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.

She Was Tired Of Everyone Wanting To Go To Heaven, Nobody Wanting To Die. The Only Thing Worth Grieving Over, She Said, Was That Sometimes There Was More Beauty In This Life Than The World Could Bear.

I Write About What I Know; And I Write About Things That Are New To Me, And That I Didn't Know Before.

I'm Not So Sure That I Can Teach People How To, You Know, Write Dialogue Or Create Plot Or Anything Like That. But If I Can Get Them And Grab Them By The Scruff Of The Neck And Say, You Can Do This, And If I See That Fire In Their Eyes, That's When I Think I Know A Writer.

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.

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.

There Are Fewer And Fewer Jews In Ireland, But We Still Have One Of The Most Famous Jewish Characters In Literary History, Of Course, In Leopold Bloom.

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.

The Thing About Love Is That We Come Alive In Bodies Not Our Own.

This Is Not My Life. These Are Not My Cobwebs. This Is Not The Darkness I Was Designed For.

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

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