Colum McCann Quotes

There are no days more full than those we go back to.

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

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

A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

There was something in the music of the accent that Douglass liked: it was as if the Cork people put long lazy hammocks in their sentences.

They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who'd soon turn into empty chairs.

Her smile colud've broen glass.

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

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

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.

There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again.

Her smile could've broken glass.

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?

The wind surged in a roar, then died down like it was pondering some heavy shit, then started back up like before.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

She might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.

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

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

I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.

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.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

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

Sometimes you've got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

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

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

They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead.

But being rational about it didn't cure it.

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

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

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

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

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

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

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

They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples.

banging saucepans to ring in the new year?

An optimist is a braver cynic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.

At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.

There is always room for at least two truths.

The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure.

So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

So, leave the cynics be. Out-cynic them. Step into that elsewhere. Believe that your story is bigger than yourself. In

He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can't stop the lines in time, so I'm a novelist.

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

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

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

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.

You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!

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

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.

Whatever you say, say nothing.

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

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

I don't believe the world's a particularly beautiful place, but I do believe in redemption.

I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.

We are being bought off by our affair with the contemporary drug of choice: ease.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

We have always absorbed our own disintegration.

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

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

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

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

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity.

The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

There was something of the beautiful failure about her.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

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

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

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

Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.

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

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

If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.

The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.

I suppose I've always known that it's hard to be just one person. the key is in the door and it can always be opened.

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.