“There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.”

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: A Fear of Love

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and w…" by Colum McCann?
Colum McCann photo
Colum McCann 71
Irish writer and journalist 1965

Related quotes

Prevale photo

“It's the moments when we take risks that show the courage we have in speaking our minds.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Sono i momenti in cui corriamo dei rischi che mostrano il coraggio che abbiamo nel dire ciò che pensiamo.
Source: prevale.net

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Ted Cruz photo

“Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: A fifth kind of semantic awareness has to do with what might be called the "photographic" effects of language. We live in a universe of constant process. Everything is changing in the physical world around us. We ourselves, physically at least, are always changing. Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change. The names we use tend to "fix" that which is named, particularly if the names also carry emotional connotations... There are some semanticists who have suggested that such phrases as "national defense" and "national sovereignty" have been... maintained beyond the date for which they were prescribed. What might have been politically therapeutic at one time may prove politically fatal at another.

“We build our computers the way we build our cities--over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”

Ellen Ullman (1949) American writer

" The dumbing down of programming http://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/" Salon Tue-May-12-1998

David Levithan photo
Georges Clemenceau photo

“The enemy is at the gates of the city. The day is perhaps not far off when our breasts will be the last defence for our country. We are the children of the Revolution. Let us take inspiration from our fathers of 1792, and, like them, we will conquer.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

Poster (23 September 1870) during the Franco-Prussian War, quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 38

Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
John Burroughs photo

Related topics