Top 100 Colum McCann Quotes
#1. To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn't a hippie idea. Both of us always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from hippies. We were the edge, the definers.
Colum McCann
#2. All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.
Colum McCann
#3. It's the sort of hum that makes you feel that you're the actual ground lying under the sky, a blue hum that's all above and around you, but if you think about it too hard it will get too loud or big, and make you feel no more than just a speck.
Colum McCann
#4. ... it struck me that maybe the young girl had just been a prostitute. I felt a momentary sigh of gratitude, and then the awareness stopped me cold, the walls pulsed in on me. How cheap was I?
Colum McCann
#5. He was the son of his son
he was here, he was left behind.
Colum McCann
#6. 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
#7. Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.
Colum McCann
#8. We have always absorbed our own disintegration.
Colum McCann
#9. The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.
Colum McCann
#10. It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.
Colum McCann
#11. 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.
Colum McCann
#12. The overexamined life... It's not worth living.
Colum McCann
#14. He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground.
Colum McCann
#15. I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.
Colum McCann
#16. I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
Colum McCann
#17. 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.
Colum McCann
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. ...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
#21. You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!
Colum McCann
#22. 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
#23. At what whirling moment had she halted and turned, unbeknownst to herself, the other way?
Colum McCann
#24. 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.
Colum McCann
#25. 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
#26. Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
Colum McCann
#27. Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.
Colum McCann
#28. Every first thing is always a miracle. The first person you fall in love with. The first letter you receive. The first stone you throw. And in my conception of the novel, the letter becomes important. But what's more important is the fact that we need to continue to tell each other stories.
Colum McCann
#29. Sooner or later they all turn their backs. They all leave. That's gospel. I've been there. I've seen it. They all do.
Colum McCann
#30. 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.
Colum McCann
#31. If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.
Colum McCann
#32. Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks.
Colum McCann
#33. The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
#34. 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.'
Colum McCann
#35. It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to make sense. The squirrel scampered up a tree trunk, the sound of its nails like water in a tub.
Colum McCann
#36. 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.
Colum McCann
#37. We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here.
Colum McCann
#38. Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.
Colum McCann
#39. The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
Colum McCann
#40. The tightrope walk was an act of creation that seemed to stand in direct defiance to the act of destruction twenty-seven years later.
About Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann
#41. 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
#42. They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples.
Colum McCann
#43. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.
Colum McCann
#44. That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.
Colum McCann
#45. It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.
Colum McCann
#46. 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
#47. I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me.
Colum McCann
#48. One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
Colum McCann
#49. The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
Colum McCann
#50. 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.
Colum McCann
#52. In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
Colum McCann
#53. I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.
Colum McCann
#55. Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.
Colum McCann
#56. But being rational about it didn't cure it.
Colum McCann
#57.
I'm not God.
Then find someone who is, man.
Colum McCann
#58. Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly.
Colum McCann
#59. What was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves if incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other.
Colum McCann
#60. He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried.
Colum McCann
#61. 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
#62. She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
Colum McCann
#63. Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.
Colum McCann
#64. So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.
Colum McCann
#65. There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.
Colum McCann
#66. Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.
Colum McCann
#67. They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead.
Colum McCann
#68. 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
#69. That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.
Colum McCann
#70. You have to look on the world with a shine like no one else has.
Colum McCann
#71. I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.
Colum McCann
#72. The further away we got from 9/11, the more I wanted to find some way to recover. I wanted to talk about the more anonymous corners of the city, because I think it's very important that not all of that anger was turned to revenge.
Colum McCann
#73. 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
#74. You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven ...
Colum McCann
#75. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
Colum McCann
#76. They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who'd soon turn into empty chairs.
Colum McCann
#77. I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
Colum McCann
#78. 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
#79. One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.
Colum McCann
#80. Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.
Colum McCann
#81. 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
#82. I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
Colum McCann
#83. 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
#84. banging saucepans to ring in the new year?
Colum McCann
#86. Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.
Colum McCann
#87. The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap.
Colum McCann
#88. Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
Colum McCann
#89. Things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.
Colum McCann
#90. A brand-new thought: Transatlantic airmail. She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over, transatlantic, trans atlas, trans antic. The distance finally broken.
Colum McCann
#91. I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.
Colum McCann
#92. I have a wardrobe full of scarves now, just about every color under the sun. My trick is that I always cut them in two, down the middle. They're lighter, thinner, skinnier that way. And because I'm cheap, I get two scarves for the price of one.
Colum McCann
#93. She might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.
Colum McCann
#94. 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.
Colum McCann
#95. So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.
Colum McCann
#96.
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
#97. I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.
Colum McCann
#98. The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
Colum McCann
#99. Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.
Colum McCann
#100. 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.
Colum McCann
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