Colum McCann Quotes

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

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

Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.

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

She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

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

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

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.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.

A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.

With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

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.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

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

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

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

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.

If you sort of see yourself writing into a space that you don't always recognize, you sometimes learn things that you knew, but weren't entirely aware of. It's very liberating for a writer to go into a space where she or he has not gone before, because, instead of being a tourist, you're like an explorer now, and you're sort of lost in this new idea.

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.

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

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

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

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.

Goodness was 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. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

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.