Adam Glover

“I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“It is a common trick of Nature – and a profoundly
significant one – that, just when despair is deepest,
she waves a wand before the weary eyes and does
her best to waken an impossible hope.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Listener and Other Stories

“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 had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin