“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.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“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.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“We have always absorbed our own disintegration.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“My father had once told me the story of how, when he was in the work camp, a truckload of giant logs was brought in to be chopped. He was on ax duty with a gang of twelve. It was a dreadfully hot summer and each swing of the blade was torture. He hacked at a log and there was the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal. He bent down and found a mushroom-shaped chunk of lead embedded in the trunk. A bullet. He counted the rings from the perimeter to the bullet and found they matched his age exactly.
We never escape ourselves, he said to me years later.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
“Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.”
― Colum McCann, quote from Dancer
Colum McCann
Born place: in Ireland
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“game. A Kentucky entrepreneur hooked up a version of Wolfenstein to virtual reality goggles and brought in five hundred dollars a day at the Kentucky State Fair. But players didn’t need virtual reality goggles to feel immersed. In fact, the sense of immersion was so real that many began complaining of motion sickness. Calls were coming in even at the Apogee office saying that people were throwing up while playing the game. Wolfenstein vomit stories became items of fascination online. Theories abounded. Some players thought the game’s animation was so smooth that it tricked the brain into thinking it was moving in a real space. Other gamers thought it had something to do with the “jerkiness” of the graphics, which induced the feeling of seasickness. Some felt it was simply disorienting because there was no acceleration involved; it was like going from zero to sixty at light speed. Gamers even exchanged tips for how to play without losing one’s Doritos.”
― quote from Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
“She knew it was weird that she'd reached out to him the way she had. But she also knew that there were a lot of people in the world who regretted never doing the things they felt were right because they were afraid of seeming strange or crazy. Lisa wouldn't settle for that sort of mediocre existence, one bound by invisible social cues. And she had a good feeling that someone like Solomon Reed would appreciate that.”
― John Corey Whaley, quote from Highly Illogical Behavior
“They believe what they see, because they want to believe. They want to believe that I am normal. And for the brief moments I am with them, I fool myself into thinking the same thing.”
― A.R. Torre, quote from The Girl in 6E
“Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade.
"She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts."
Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers.
"On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia."
The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić.
The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone, in his act lay an ocean of hope.”
― Chris Hedges, quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
“We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say that the universe has empowered us, here in our small corner of the cosmos, to figure itself out. And we have only just begun.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, quote from Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
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