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Colum McCann Quotes
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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
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One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
Colum McCann
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Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.
Colum McCann
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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
Colum McCann
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The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
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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.
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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.
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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Colum McCann
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Born:
February 28, 1965
(age 59)
Bio:
Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and now lives in New York.
Known for:
Let the Great World Spin (2009)
TransAtlantic (2013)
Thirteen Ways of Looking (2015)
This side of brightness (1998)
Most used words:
love
life
people
city
god
wanted
moment
time
day
left
place
ordinary
find
heard
chance
Colum McCann on Wikipedia
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