Colum McCann

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

Gloria laughed at them and said that she__ overtaken grief a long time ago, that 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 could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.

The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

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. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

I__ not interested in blind optimism, but I__ very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, __his is not enough._ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don__.

An optimist is a braver cynic.

It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the point where I believe that it's more difficult to have hope than it is to embrace cynicism. In the deep dark end, there's no point unless we have at least a modicum of hope. We trawl our way through the darkness hoping to find a pinpoint of light. But isn't it remarkable that the cynics of this world__he politicians, the corporations, the squinty-eyed critics__eem to think that they have a claim on intelligence? They seem to think that it's cooler, more intellectually engaging, to be miserable, that there's some sort of moral heft in cynicism. But I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who are 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.

Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.

All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.

...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether._