Colum McCann Quotes

I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.

While the others
those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther
felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky.

banging saucepans to ring in the new year?

She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

He could be in any mood or any place and, unbidden, it returned.

At what whirling moment had she halted and turned, unbeknownst to herself, the other way?

They entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger.

Nobody falls halfway

Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter
it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

I'm of the opinion that the real is imagined and the imagined is quite real. The real is imagined, in the sense that we shape our stories, so anything that even happens on the news gets shaped in a certain way and gets a texture, and that the imagined can be real.

He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here.

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.

What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn't think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go. Even dead, he'd still do that. His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted.

There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.
There is, I think, a fear of love.
There is a fear of love.

Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.

If your life doesn't flash in front of your eyes, old boy, does that mean you've had no life at all?

If you think of the world without people it's about the most perfect thing there ever is. It's all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up.

So many times people would come up to him after his lectures and say that they wished there were more like him. What do you mean? he would ask. Immediately they would realize what they had said and drop their heads. As if he didn't encounter people like himself every single day, at every single angle. As if he were the only sort of Palestinian they could stomach.

I'm very boring, really: I live on the Upper East Side, a block from the park. I have three kids. I go for a jog around the park every day with my dog.

The conspiracy of women. We are in it together, make no mistake.

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.

There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance.

The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no

I'm not interested in blind optimism, but I'm very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, 'This is not enough.'

The smell of the earth, so astoundingly fresh: it strikes Brown like a thing he might eat. His ears throb. His body feels as if it is still moving through the air. He is, he thinks, the first man ever to fly and stand at the exact same time. The war out of the machine. He holds the small bag of letters up in salute. On they come, soldiers, people, the light drizzle of gray.
Ireland.
A beautiful country. A bit savage on a man all the same.
Ireland.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me.

He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father's father?

I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

It was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.
'My own sons,' he said.
We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside.

Her smile colud've broen glass.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along
trying to wound his faith in order to test it
and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

you soon find out how loud the silence really is. everything unsaid leads eventually to what is said.

If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find
in the grime of the everyday ... he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.

That the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget.

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle.

The overexamined life... It's not worth living.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.

Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.

We have always absorbed our own disintegration.

That he'd see the light and it'd still be in a tunnel.

I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.

She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn't interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazzlyn was too. They were like strangers on a porch, Gloria and Jazzlyn, with the evening sun going down: they just sat there together and neither could say what the other one knew, so they just kept quiet, and watched the day descend. One of them said good night, while the other waited.

My wardrobe is drab. I could spend six weeks in the same jeans. Most everything I have is blue or black, but certainly not cool.

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lifted miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day umtouched, some old, lost sweet tasting time.

A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines.

They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples.

'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on.

One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.

When you come into a rich man's house, the only place to split is in his face.

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound.

In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

Was there not wage slavery? Were there not the chains of financial oppression?

There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?

What was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves if incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other.

When a great truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky
pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.

The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldn't.

It's like moving through a delicious fog.

And when you go around in circles, brother, the world is very big, but if you plow straight ahead it's small enough.

For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.

The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.

About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.

Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.

Claire wants to say: Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all once, twice, three times. But all she does is smile at Marcia and give her what she hopes is a nod that understands that it's absolutely no problem to say fuck, on Park Avenue, on a Wednesday, at a coffee morning, in fact it's probably the best thing to say, given the circumstances, maybe they should all say it in unison, make a singsong out of it.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.

Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in fiction is dangerous. It also lacks imagination.

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there, but I'll tell you anyways: once upon a time and long ago ...

Death by drowning, death by snakebite ... death by memory loss, death by claymore ... death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game ... death by authority, death by isolation, death by genocide, death by Kennedy ... death by signature, death by silence ... death by performance

At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own.

When I sat down beside them, their silence was lined with tenderness. We have to admire the world for not ending on us.

You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11.

I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.

Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.

Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.

That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.

Whatever you say, say nothing.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

He was the son of his son
he was here, he was left behind.

You're manic-depressive and you're manic-depressive too and you, you're definitely manic-depressive, girl. And you over there in the corner, you're just plain fucking depressive.

I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student – thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.

I have nobody left to whom I can tell the story.