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Colum McCann

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“In the room, the clocks tick, unseen. It has been a day of shadows and redirection, revelation and lies. Diane gets the vague sense that Kotey — with his confi dence and his silence — might think himself to be the smartest person in the room. He is intelligent yes, but it’s an intelligence that needs to wear a disguise. And besides, the smartest person in the room is the one who knows she, or he, is never the smartest at all: herein lies the contradiction. She wonders now if he has just said exactly the things she wanted to hear? She knows herself to be naïve at times: she admits this to herself. Yes, it is true, she has often been far too open to people in the past. She has been stung. Government offi cials who have deceived her. Pretenders from the FBI. Misdirection from the State Department and White House. Politicians. Negotiators. Informers. Conmen. And, perhaps now, Kotey. But she also knows that the naivety is necessary to cultivate something deeper. She wants to remain open to the world. Compassion, Lord. And mercy. And patience. There will be one more session tomorrow. Perhaps they will achieve something more than this intimate stand-off . But then again, perhaps nothing. She pulls back her chair and thanks him. It is dangerous, she knows, to thank him, her son’s murderer. But she must do it anyway. Perhaps it’s only politeness. Perhaps it’s something more. “In another life,” she says, “you and Jim might have been friends.”

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Author:Colum McCann
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“Het was makkelijk genoeg om een programma te schrijven dat de doden zou ordenen, zei hij, maar eigenlijk wilde hij een programma schrijven dat de zin van het sterven kon verklaren. Dat was de verre toekomst. Ooit zouden de computers alle grote geesten bijeenbrengen. Over dertig, veertig, honderd jaar. Als we elkaar voor die tijd niet opblazen. We zitten op het topje van de menselijke kennis, mamma.”

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Book:Let The Great World Spin
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“Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.”

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Author:Colum McCann
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“I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.”

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Author:Colum McCann
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“I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.”

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Author:Colum McCann
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