Colum McCann Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

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

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

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

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

I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.

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

Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.

I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years

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

You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven.

Whatever you say, say nothing.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.

Personally, I like the social novel. I like writing that gets in and under the hood and looks about - at what's going on. But I don't say to any writer that that's absolutely what they should do.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.

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

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.

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

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

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

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