Colum McCann Quotes

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
Colum McCann
We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.
Colum McCann
And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn't happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening.
Colum McCann
I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.
Colum McCann
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
Colum McCann
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
They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.
Colum McCann
She expected no judgement and wanted no pity.
Colum McCann
He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.
Colum McCann
There are no days more full than those we go back to.
Colum McCann
His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.
Colum McCann
The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet.
Colum McCann
Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
Colum McCann
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
Colum McCann
I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.
Colum McCann
The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no
Colum McCann
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
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. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.
Colum McCann
Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.
Colum McCann
A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.
Colum McCann
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
It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the point where I believe that it's more difficult to have hope than it is to embrace cynicism. In the deep dark end, there's no point unless we have at least a modicum of hope. We trawl our way through the darkness hoping to find a pinpoint of light. But isn't it remarkable that the cynics of this world—the politicians, the corporations, the squinty-eyed critics—seem to think that they have a claim on intelligence? They seem to think that it's cooler, more intellectually engaging, to be miserable, that there's some sort of moral heft in cynicism. But I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who are 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
An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCann
Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.
Colum McCann
All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.
Colum McCann
...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether. 
Colum McCann
The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.
Colum McCann
Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.
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
One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
Colum McCann
We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear 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
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
Colum McCann
It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.
Colum McCann
We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.
Colum McCann
She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.
Colum McCann
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
Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.
Colum McCann
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
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
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
Colum McCann
Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. 'Where d'you think you're going?'Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. 'That's not your room,' sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. 'Don't,' said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.'My own sons,' he said.We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside.
Colum McCann
Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that 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
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
Colum McCann
That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.
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 a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.
Colum McCann
Rather 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.
Colum McCann
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
I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
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