"Hours and hours of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. If you watched the rubbish for a while you could tell the exact shape of the wind. Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Sometimes a bit of plastic caught against a pipe or touched the top of the chain-link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned. The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a lineless fishing pole out the window but he didn't catch any. The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from IrelandNovelists from IrelandShort story writers from IrelandColumnistsJournalists from Ireland
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Colum_McCann
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Colum McCann
37 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Colum McCann β
Related Quotes
"There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, alwaysβ¦"
"The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own."
"A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You β¦"
"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heaβ¦"
"The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seβ¦"
"Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They're not Magdalenes. You're just β¦"
"If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures."
"I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student β thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of theβ¦"
"We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as β¦"
"Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get."