“ 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. Colum McCann
“ Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive. Colum McCann
“ There's a high that you get when you're writing code. It's cool. It's easy to do. You forget your mom, your dad, everything. You've got the whole country onboard. This is America. You hit the frontier… Colum McCann
“ All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it. Colum McCann
“ He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn’t count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn’t figure out how many crosses to go into the ground. Colum McCann
“ —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. Colum McCann
“ He was there, he said, to raise just a single hat, but eventually that hat would raise the heavens. He would go forth as a slave no more. Colum McCann
“ She wondered if she owned a faint idea of many things, and a strong idea of only a few. As if she had developed an immunity to depth. That she only, now, skimmed the surface. Colum McCann
“ 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. Colum McCann
“ The wind surged in a roar, then died down like it was pondering some heavy shit, then started back up like before. Colum McCann
“ 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. Colum McCann
“ To summon things into being by the mysterious alchemy of language. Atlantic. Atlas. Aloft. He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under. Colum McCann
“ She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we’d never seen. Colum McCann
“ 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, listenin… Colum McCann
“ Rather 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.… Colum McCann
“ The short sharp shock of three thousand mother two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's… Colum McCann
