Colum McCann Quotes

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.

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

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

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.

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

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

We have to admire the world for not ending on us.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.

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

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

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

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

We shape ourselves by our imaginative reach.

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.

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

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.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

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

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.