Colum McCann Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.

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

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 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
Sometimes we 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.

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

Colum McCann
Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.

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

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

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

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
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
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
I knew then that it would end badly, her and Corrigan, these children. Someone or other was going to get torn asunder. And yet why shouldn't they fall in love, if even just for a short while? Why shouldn't Corrigan live his life in the body that was hurting him, giving up in places? Why shouldn't he have a moment of release from this God of his? It was a torture shop for him, worrying about the world, having to deal with intricacies when what he really wanted was to be ordinary and do the simple thing. Yet nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. Poverty, chastity, obedience — he had spent his life in fealty to them, but was unarmed when they turned against him.

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

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

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

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

Colum McCann
She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs— she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.

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
Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

Colum McCann
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.

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 it really was, what it meant.

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

Colum McCann