Colum Quotes & Sayings

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 seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it 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 really was, what it meant. — Colum McCann

But being rational about it didn't cure it. — Colum McCann

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty. — 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

I suppose I've always known that it's hard to be just one person. the key is in the door and it can always be opened. — Colum McCann

Colum McCann, after I explicitly asked for advice regarding my career. He said: Don't be a dick. — Anonymous

I'd been involved in journalism for a long time - my dad's a journalist, he's written many books, and when I was twelve years old I wrote reports on local football matches for the newspapers. — 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

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. — Colum McCann

What's the matter, Colum? Are you tired of all the currently available pieces in this keep? What happened? Did you run out of new ones? Well, I've got news for you, buddy. This piece isn't up for grabs by just anyone who comes along. The only man good enough to get between my legs is gonna be the man I decide to call husband! — Maeve Greyson

I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves. — Colum McCann

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

- What is it about wine, Harry?
- What d'ya mean?
- What is it that cures us?
- Made to glorify the gods. And dull the idiots. — Colum McCann

What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn't think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go. Even dead, he'd still do that. His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted. — Colum McCann

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

The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, have become it. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs. — 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

Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give. — Colum McCann

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

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

Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow — Colum McCann

Most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick. One was a lawyer, a tall, fat sandy-haired man. He lorded it over the others by buying them drinks. They clinked glasses with him and called him a 'motherfucking ambulance chaser' when he went to the bathroom. It was not a series of words they would have used at home
motherfucking ambulance chasers weren't big in the old country
but they said it as often as they could. With great hilarity they injected it into songs when the lawyer left. One of the songs had an ambulance chaser going over the Cork and Kerry mountains. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kenna wet her lips and swallowed hard. The off-white linen of Colum's tunic made his wide expanse of hard-muscled chest and squared shoulders look as though the man had been dipped in white chocolate. Damn, I love white chocolate. Kenna licked her lips again. But she'd bet her favorite nail polish that a taste of Colum would bean any chocolate she'd ever eaten. — Maeve Greyson

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

although i know that a wall to happiness is expecting too much happiness — Colum McCann

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

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there. — Colum McCann

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

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

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

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

There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again. — Colum McCann

Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them. — Colum McCann

In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. 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. — Colum McCann

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He
went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He
took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith. — 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

It's like moving through a delicious fog. — Colum McCann

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find
in the grime of the everyday ... 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. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. — Colum McCann

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

Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water. — Colum McCann

What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. — Colum McCann

banging saucepans to ring in the new year? — Colum McCann

I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O woman shapely as a swan. — Padraic Colum

My father had once told me the story of how, when he was in the work camp, a truckload of giant logs was brought in to be chopped. He was on ax duty with a gang of twelve. It was a dreadfully hot summer and each swing of the blade was torture. He hacked at a log and there was the unmistakable sound of metal hitting metal. He bent down and found a mushroom-shaped chunk of lead embedded in the trunk. A bullet. He counted the rings from the perimeter to the bullet and found they matched his age exactly.

We never escape ourselves, he said to me years later. — Colum McCann

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

Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks. — Colum McCann

The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last. — 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

I would change the knowledge I have into wisdom, so that the things that are to happen will be changed into the best that may be. — Padraic Colum

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

He was not beyond knowing that they thought him - when he first arrived - a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. He wasn't interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible. — 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

The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure. — 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

Good days, they come around the oddest corners. — 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

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

She expected no judgement and wanted no pity. — Colum McCann

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

When a great truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. — Colum McCann

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough. — Colum McCann

'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on. — Colum McCann

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple
hate your enemy, know nothing of him. — Mccann Colum

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

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. — Colum McCann