Your Daily Dose of Colum McCann

Walking was holy - it cleared the mind.

Choosing a favorite living novelist is like walking the plank: Inevitably you end up drowning, but at least it’s in a sea of heroes.

I stretched wide like love.

Her politics were those of road and grass.

I am partial, still, to the recklessness if the imagination. The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing Möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

Some people call it romantic or sentimental. I’d rather call it fighting.

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

“I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.”

Despite the weight of evidence against human nature — we are all still capable of small moments of resurrection, no matter where we happen to be.

The true art of peace, negotiators know, lies in our ability to deal with the mighty weapon of language.

So you force yourself into a position of difficulty, because it seems to me that we’ve forgotten… the excellence of difficulty… But there’s something really beautiful in the notion of difficulty.

Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine.

We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.

We leave in order, one day, to remember. The nostalgia slips between our rib cages and turns our hearts a few notches backward.

This is a human victory over war, the triumph of endurance over memory.

What Obama did - and continues to do - is expand the lungs of our ongoing sense of identity.

Random moments of beauty. They are almost enough.