Colum Mccann Quotes

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

~ 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

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

We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ Colum Mccann

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

~ Colum Mccann

Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

~ Colum Mccann

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.'My own sons,' he said.We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside.

~ 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

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

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

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ Colum Mccann

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

~ Colum Mccann

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ Colum Mccann

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

~ Colum Mccann

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

~ 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

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

~ Colum Mccann

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ Colum Mccann

...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether. 

~ Colum Mccann

All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.

~ Colum Mccann

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

An optimist is a braver cynic.

~ Colum Mccann

It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the point where I believe that it's more difficult to have hope than it is to embrace cynicism. In the deep dark end, there's no point unless we have at least a modicum of hope. We trawl our way through the darkness hoping to find a pinpoint of light. But isn't it remarkable that the cynics of this world—the politicians, the corporations, the squinty-eyed critics—seem to think that they have a claim on intelligence? They seem to think that it's cooler, more intellectually engaging, to be miserable, that there's some sort of moral heft in cynicism. But I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who are 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

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ 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. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.

~ Colum Mccann

Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ Colum Mccann

I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ Colum Mccann

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

~ Colum Mccann

His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.

~ Colum Mccann

The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet.

~ Colum Mccann

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

~ 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

She expected no judgement and wanted no pity.

~ Colum Mccann