Colum Mccann Quotes

If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be. ~ Colum McCann

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

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones. ~ Colum McCann

I was reminded of how years before, he had drifted away from one of our afternoon strolls and got surrounded by the tide - Corrigan, isolated on a sandbar, tangled in light, voices from the shores drifting over him, calling his name. ~ Colum McCann

It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences. ~ Colum McCann

She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs
she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn't happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening. ~ Colum McCann

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come. ~ Colum McCann

She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours. ~ Colum McCann

The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap. ~ Colum McCann

...only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself. ~ Colum McCann

I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world. ~ Colum McCann

Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water. ~ Colum McCann

With all respects to heaven, I like it here. ~ Colum McCann

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians. ~ Colum McCann

He was not beyond knowing that they thought him - when he first arrived - a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. He wasn't interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it. ~ Colum McCann

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple
hate your enemy, know nothing of him. ~ Mccann Colum

He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood. He had seen a t-shirt once that said: New York F***in City. As of it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would. ~ Mccann Colum

It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs. ~ Colum McCann

'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. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory. ~ Colum McCann

Colum McCann, after I explicitly asked for advice regarding my career. He said: Don't be a dick. ~ Anonymous

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 ... ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

The quiet lines matter as much as the noisy ones. ~ Colum McCann

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. ~ Colum McCann

Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks. ~ Colum McCann

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

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

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? ~ Colum McCann

He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic. ~ Colum McCann

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect. ~ Colum McCann

Darkness doesn't fall, he thought as he swayed to the radio, it rises up from the bottom of the sea and begins to breathe around us. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

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

He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried. ~ Colum McCann

I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street. ~ Colum McCann

She expected no judgement and wanted no pity. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur. ~ Colum McCann

In the end you should probably know your characters as well as you know yourself. Not only what they had for breakfast this morning, but what they wanted to have for breakfast. ~ Colum McCann

The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, have become it. ~ Colum McCann

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else. ~ Colum McCann

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

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

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. ~ Colum McCann

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

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

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

And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us? ~ Colum McCann

You have to look on the world with a shine like no one else has. ~ Colum McCann

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

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

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell. ~ Colum McCann

Then the clouds curtsy in, the rain kneels upon the land, and the weather knocks them back a whole day and a half. ~ Colum McCann

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

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

A priest? I said.
A monk or some such. One of those worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis.
Theologian, said the other.
One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare. ~ Colum McCann

There is nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty of the world than language. ~ Colum McCann

Bits of it floating in the air, he said. It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's there and it's all coming down, covering everything. You're breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it's so fine you don't notice it. But you're covered in it. It's everywhere. What I mean is, we're afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we stopped to take account of it, we'd just fall into despair. But we can't stop. We've got to keep going. ~ Colum McCann

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told. ~ Colum McCann

They will have to live with it for the rest of the trip now, but Alcock knows how the engine roar can make a pilot fall asleep, that the rhythm can lull a man into nodding off before he hits the waves. It is fierce work--he can feel the machine in his muscles. The sheer tug through his body. The exhaustion of the mind. Always avoiding cloud. Always looking for a line of sight. Creating any horizon possible. The brain inventing phantom turns. The inner ear balancing the angles until the only thing that can truly be trusted is the dream of getting there. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

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

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. ~ Colum McCann

It's about fear. You know! They're all throbbing with fear. We all are ... Bits of it floating in the air. It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's there and it's all coming down, covering everything. You're breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it's so fine you don't notice it. But you're covered in it. It's everywhere. What I mean is, we're afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we've stopped to take account of it, we'd just fall into despair. But we can't stop. We've for to keep going. ~ Colum McCann

Are you saying I'm a liar?
No I'm just, like, speaking. ~ Colum McCann

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

- What is it about wine, Harry?
- What d'ya mean?
- What is it that cures us?
- Made to glorify the gods. And dull the idiots. ~ Colum McCann

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough. ~ Colum McCann

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. ~ Colum McCann

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

They say ol' man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He's the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart. ~ Colum McCann

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

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. ~ Colum McCann

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. ~ Colum McCann

...there was always hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent,as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so. ~ Colum McCann

An optimist is a braver cynic. ~ Colum McCann

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

It (NY) was like the city that Lot left behind and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey. ~ Colum McCann

There was a quote about "standing in a river too long or long enough" that I can't find now. Anyone remember? If so, what page? ~ Colum McCann

He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites. ~ Colum McCann

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

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

If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. ~ Colum McCann

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

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. ~ Colum McCann

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough. ~ Colum McCann