Top 100 Colum Mccann Quotes
#1. I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.
Phil Klay
#2. Colum McCann, after I explicitly asked for advice regarding my career. He said: Don't be a dick.
Anonymous
#3. There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again.
Colum McCann
#5. I don't believe the world's a particularly beautiful place, but I do believe in redemption.
Colum McCann
#6. 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
#7. Goodness is 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.
Colum McCann
#8. It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.
Colum McCann
#9. The wind surged in a roar, then died down like it was pondering some heavy shit, then started back up like before.
Colum McCann
#10. 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
#11. This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
Colum McCann
#12. Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.
Colum McCann
#13. Back home, he sleeps in Clarence's bed. Then he moves across and arranges the pillows beside the ghost of his wife. All three of them lie down together. The pulse of Louis Armstrong sounds out from the record player, the notes moving tenderly through his torment.
Colum McCann
#14. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrapy your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
Colum McCann
#15. All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.
Colum McCann
#17. 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
#18. 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 at once, twice, three times.
Colum McCann
#19. ... 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
#20. He was the son of his son
he was here, he was left behind.
Colum McCann
#21. 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.
Colum McCann
#22. Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.
Colum McCann
#23. The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That's where the camera came in. It was the unspoken thing between him and the others.
Colum McCann
#24. I was a little bit perturbed by the whole big grief machine that grew out of 9/11. I knew that I wanted to write about it, but I wasn't sure about how to go about it.
Colum McCann
#25. 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
#26. The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.
Colum McCann
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.
Colum McCann
#30. And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.
Colum McCann
#31. There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.
Colum McCann
#32. 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
#33. 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
Colum McCann
#34. A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines.
Colum McCann
#35. I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.
Colum McCann
#36. We have always absorbed our own disintegration.
Colum McCann
#37. The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.
Colum McCann
#38. 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
#39. Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
Colum McCann
#40. 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
#41. So, leave the cynics be. Out-cynic them. Step into that elsewhere. Believe that your story is bigger than yourself. In
Colum McCann
#42. The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no
Colum McCann
#43. Rain fell more steadily now. Grey and unrelenting. Nobody seemed to notice. Rain on the puddles. Rain on the high brickwork. Rain on the slate roofs. Rain on the rain itself.
Colum McCann
#44. The overexamined life... It's not worth living.
Colum McCann
#46. He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground.
Colum McCann
#47. For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.
Colum McCann
#48. He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father's father?
Colum McCann
#49. I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.
Colum McCann
#50. If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.
Colum McCann
#51. I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
Colum McCann
#52. 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
#53. Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.
Colum McCann
#54. 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
#55. although i know that a wall to happiness is expecting too much happiness
Colum McCann
#56. 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
#57. The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.
Colum McCann
#58. 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
#59. It's hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light. The problem is that the images that so often return to me are seldom those I want.
Colum McCann
#60. ...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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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.
Colum McCann
#64. At what whirling moment had she halted and turned, unbeknownst to herself, the other way?
Colum McCann
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Mornings in the kitchen, afternoons in the counseling room, evenings out combing streets of half-lamplight: Hermann Park, Montrose, Sunnyside, Hiram Clarke, the Fifth Ward.
Colum McCann
#68. Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
Colum McCann
#69. Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.
Colum McCann
#70. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.
Colum McCann
#71. 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
#72. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
Colum McCann
#73. 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
#74. The stars looked like nail heads in the sky
pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.
Colum McCann
#75. 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
#76. If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.
Colum McCann
#77. How very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.
Colum McCann
#78. Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks.
Colum McCann
#79. The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away, like an ancient word stepping off a page.
Colum McCann
#80. The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
#81. 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
#82. Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCann
#84. 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
#85. He was there, he said, to raise just a single hat, but eventually that hat would raise the heavens. He would go forth as a slave no more.
Colum McCann
#86. Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow
Colum McCann
#87. 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
#88. We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here.
Colum McCann
#89. We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.
Colum McCann
#90. There is nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty of the world than language.
Colum McCann
#91. Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.
Colum McCann
#92. The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
Colum McCann
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
Colum McCann
#96. Rather 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.
Colum McCann
#97. They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples.
Colum McCann
#98. Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.
Colum McCann
#99. The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.
Colum McCann
#100. The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.
Colum McCann
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