Colum McCann Quotes & Sayings

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

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns. — Colum McCann

Are you saying I'm a liar?
No I'm just, like, speaking. — 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

There was something of the beautiful failure about her. — Colum McCann

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

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity. — Colum McCann

Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance. — Colum McCann

A good doctor. He would not let her take pills. Try each day just to laugh a little bit, it's a good medicine, he said. Pills were a second option. I should have taken them. No. Better off to try laughing. Die laughing. — Colum McCann

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. — Colum McCann

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

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

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy. — Colum McCann

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. — 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

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

They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

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

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

He could be in any mood or any place and, unbidden, it returned. — Colum McCann

There are moments we return to. We are in theme. We rest there and there is nothing else. — Colum McCann

That the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget. — Colum McCann

It's about fear. You know! They're all throbbing with fear. We all are ... Bits of it floating in the air. It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's there and it's all coming down, covering everything. You're breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it's so fine you don't notice it. But you're covered in it. It's everywhere. What I mean is, we're afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we've stopped to take account of it, we'd just fall into despair. But we can't stop. We've for to keep going. — Colum McCann

I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year! — Colum McCann

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

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

There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it? — Colum McCann

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it.
Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book — Colum McCann

The overexamined life... It's not worth living. — Colum McCann

There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance. — Colum McCann

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

While the others
those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther
felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky. — Colum McCann

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

The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more. — Colum McCann

With all respects to heaven, I like it here. — Colum McCann

It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn't want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn't want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched. — Colum McCann

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

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

Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

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

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. — Colum McCann

They will have to live with it for the rest of the trip now, but Alcock knows how the engine roar can make a pilot fall asleep, that the rhythm can lull a man into nodding off before he hits the waves. It is fierce work--he can feel the machine in his muscles. The sheer tug through his body. The exhaustion of the mind. Always avoiding cloud. Always looking for a line of sight. Creating any horizon possible. The brain inventing phantom turns. The inner ear balancing the angles until the only thing that can truly be trusted is the dream of getting there. — Colum McCann

The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist.Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives. — Colum McCann

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

Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we own it, and women have really been in those quieter moments at the edge of history. But, really, they're the ones who are turning the cogs and the wheels and allowing things like the peace process to happen. — Colum McCann

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable. — Colum McCann

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

He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground. — Colum McCann

Some days he wishes that he could simply empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow
not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

Good days, they come around the oddest corners. — Colum McCann

She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father's cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had always refused him that. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their reflection in the glass. The water behind them stretched distant and black. I stood in the doorway a long, long time, unsure of what to do or say. I wasn't interested in their — 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

One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down. — Colum McCann

There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past. I — Colum McCann

They say ol' man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He's the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

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

There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar. — Colum McCann

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

At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own. — Colum McCann

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

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lifted miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day umtouched, some old, lost sweet tasting time. — Colum McCann

Wash your dress in running water. dry it on the southern side of a rock. let them have four guesses and make them all wrong. take a fistful of snow in the summer heat. cook haluski in hot sweet butter. drink cold milk to clean your insides. be careful when you wake: breathing lets them know how asleep you are. don't hang your coat from a hook in the door. ignore curfew. remember weather by the voice of the wheel. do not become the fool they need you to become. change your name. lose your shoes. practice doubt. dress in oiled cloth around sickness. adore darkness. turn sideways in the wind. the changing of stories is a cheerful affair. give the impression of not having known. — Colum McCann

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

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

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty. — Colum McCann

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

He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake. — Colum McCann

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

He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted - it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his finge — Colum McCann

A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle. — Colum McCann

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

We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get. — Colum McCann

...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

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic. — Colum McCann

There is always room for at least two truths. — Colum McCann

I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself. — Colum McCann

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max's Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn't get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another. if only we had been so careful with ourselves. — Colum McCann