Twist Colum Mccann Quotes

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.

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.

What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn't think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go. Even dead, he'd still do that. His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted.

What was it Pascal had written? All of our problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Not a single atom in our bodies today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replaced many times over. We flake away and become new. Whatever we are now, we are not the stuff from which we were originally made. All the people we once were. All the people we had once hoped to be.

The most casual things can, after all, twist our tired hearts.

It was no great surprise that the world felt as if it were in chains since they actually trawled the ocean floor and tied us up in easy knots.

Everything gets fixed and we all stay broken.

Just because the truth is ignored doesn’t mean it’s not true.

If the ocean was a bank, they’d have saved it a long time ago.

I suppose we go out to sea because we want, eventually, to come home. I know this now, but it was new to me then. The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.

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. No

The mind begs for logic but gets the actual world. We fall back on invention.

Stupid to think that our wine will never turn.

The backspin of memory lands us in the strangest of places.

The wonder of things is that they were ever created in the first place. Maybe that was the simplicity we needed. Everything is made to be disassembled. Not all of it can be repaired. All there is is the trying.

Those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can’t guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Ta-Nehisi Coates

Who can say where anything truly begins? The cloud, the raindrop, the original speck of dust around which water collects? We can only ever locate the middle when we get to the end. And then, at the absolute end, what’s the point in finding the middle, or even the beginning?

can’t go on, must go on

There’s an odd grace in not just settling for the simple Fuck off.

I had begun to think that there might be something monumental here. A vague element of the mythical. The velocity of who we are. Every scrap of existence colliding inside the tubes: the weak force, the strong force, the theory of everything. And, of course, every inanity was whirling inside there too. All of it tumbling in unison along the sea floor.

It was a boat, a small boat, an older boat, not much more than the length of a couple of blue whales, and there was one intention, the story immemorial: to survive the harpoon, skip the vortex, complete the job, and get back to where we came from.

More life on the bottom of the ocean than anywhere else. In the vents. The layers. The currents. Things down there betray all the categories.

The tubes are tiny. They are hollow. They weigh nothing. All they carry is light. I can’t presume to explain this. It is one of the things that still continues to fill me with wonder.

I was hooked on the plot of the waves.

She whispered my name and she sounded like the first person ever to say it.

I suppose we end up surviving by our ability to forget.

There is no logic. The world is messy. The answers lie in the beyond.

She studied fluidity.

If you can’t shake something free you go back and grasp it.

The wild crunch of coincidence...

There was something very calm and unrushed about him. If there was a clock inside him instructing time it was ticking slower than the time pieces inside of the rest of us. It wasn’t that he tamped down the moment or tightened it or obscured it. On the contrary he gave air to it, let it hover, made it new.

the flotsam of our longings, the jetsam of our truths,

We are all shards in the smash up.

The past is retrievable, yes, but it most certainly cannot be changed.

I have learned how easy it is to condescend when you don’t participate.

Our lives, even the unruptured ones, bounce around on the sea floor. For a while we might brush tenderly against one another, but eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter.

All that traffic on the floor of the unknown.

The days come and go. They bird themselves against the widow and end up at our, stunned.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

takotsubo, which had surfaced in my mind on the very first day

The depths hum with just about everything imaginable. Moving at an unimaginable speed. In a reinforced tube no bigger than a garden hose. You are here one moment. And then, in a nanosecond, you are somewhere else.

The disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface.

Nothing, not even words, can stop the flow of time.

I felt myself floating towards the shadow of the dreamer I once had been.

Who knows what it was that the cable was carrying at the time, all the love notes, all the algorithms, all the financial dealings, the solicitations, the prescriptions, the solutions, the insinuations, the theories, the chess games, the sea charts, the histories, the contracts, the divorce papers, the computer hacks, the wild lies, the voices, the terror, the nonsense, the known, the unknown, the promises, the porn, the alphabet of flesh, the sing-song of skin, the million wisps of disinformation, the flotsam of our longings, the jetsam of our truths, all of it, all, suspended in a series of wet tubes at the bottom of the ocean floor.

So much of who we are is who we cannot be. We flatter ourselves when we think we can become something entirely new.

The bottle does a good job of drinking the mind.