Colum McCann quotes

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

#Inspirational #World #Chaos

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.
-- Colum McCann

#Optimism #Darkness #Sometimes

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

#Beautiful #Love Is #Alive

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

#Writing

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.
-- Colum McCann

#Heart #Simple #Long

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

#Mistake #Moving #Pride

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.
-- Colum McCann

#Memories #Water #Trying

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

#Beautiful #Silence #Awful

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

#World #Admire

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

#Real #Thinking #Doors

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

#Thinking #Goes On

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.
-- Colum McCann

#Home #Dark #Tunnels

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.
-- Colum McCann

#New York #Moments #Landing

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

#Tired #Grieving #Heaven

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

#Real #Light #Darkness

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.
-- Colum McCann

#People #Matter #Sentimental

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

#Long #Giving #Alive

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

#Fiction #Alive #Body

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

#Stories #Literature #Life Is

I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
-- Colum McCann

#Said

If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
-- Colum McCann

#Should #Stills

You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11.
-- Colum McCann

#Thinking #World #Trade

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

#Important #Illusion #Possibility

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

#People #Perfect #Half

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

#Heart #Care #Might

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

#Sometimes #Function

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

#Math #Heaven #Cost

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

#Thinking #Silence #Ongoing

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

#Loneliness #Trying #World

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.
-- Colum McCann

#Wind #Rivers #Tangled

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.
-- Colum McCann

#Past #Thinking #Skins

I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
-- Colum McCann

#Class #Safe #Grew Up

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
-- Colum McCann

#Jobs #Emotional #Years

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

#Pain #Giving

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

#Mother #Brother #Wind

About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.
-- Colum McCann

#Years #United States #Rags

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

#Art #Recovery #Joy

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

#Blessed #Lucky #Feels

Whatever you say, say nothing.
-- Colum McCann

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
-- Colum McCann

#Real #Ballet #Sometimes

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

#Incidents #Shelves #Accumulation

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

#Two #Rooms

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

#Character #Thinking #Ideas

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

#Thinking #Ordinary #Ordinary Life

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

#Pain #People #Endurance

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

#Pain #Giving

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.
-- Colum McCann

#Hate #War #Simple