Colum McCann Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

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.

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
One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.

Colum McCann
A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can.

Colum McCann
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.

Colum McCann
Every immigrant carries in him or her a certain quiet desire to be wounded. It's the nature of leaving in the first place. We leave in order, one day, to remember.

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

Colum McCann
She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. 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. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple - hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat.

Colum McCann
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
I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

Colum McCann
Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world's oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons.

Colum McCann
You know, when you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again.

Colum McCann
We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

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
Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.

Colum McCann
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
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
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
I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.

Colum McCann
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
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.

Colum McCann
Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.

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

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

Colum McCann
If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.

Colum McCann
At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.

Colum McCann
Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They're not Magdalenes. You're just a bum among them. You're looking for the poor man within? Why don't you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?

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

Colum McCann
He wondered if that was what the moment of death was about, the noise of the world and then ease away from it.

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

Colum McCann