Top 153 Quotes & Sayings by Colum McCann - Page 2

I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.

Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

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.

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

If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.

The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.

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.

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

Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.

Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.

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.

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

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

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

With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

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.

I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.

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.

I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!

There is always room for at least two truths.

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

A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.

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.

A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.

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

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.

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 really was, what it meant.

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.

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

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

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

If you sort of see yourself writing into a space that you don't always recognize, you sometimes learn things that you knew, but weren't entirely aware of. It's very liberating for a writer to go into a space where she or he has not gone before, because, instead of being a tourist, you're like an explorer now, and you're sort of lost in this new idea.

...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

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

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

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

She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.

Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

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.

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

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

She wanted to tell him so mach, 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.

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

I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.

We shape ourselves by our imaginative reach.

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.

I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.

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.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.