A Quote by 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.
During those days when you're exhausted and during those days when you're frustrated, during those days when you're being attacked by your own people for doing what you think is right, remember you're part of a progression that goes back a long time of ordinary people who are doing their best to make it a better world.
I had a '69 Road Runner when I was a kid. I had it for 13 days, came home one day, and my parents were in the driveway. They said, 'Meet the new owner,' because they'd gotten phone calls about me burning rubber for the last 12 days. They thought I'd wrap it around a tree, and it was too much car for a 16 year old.
To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two - to fix your opponent's expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.
This is about all the bad days in the world. I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. "Oh, it's just a couple little innocent bad days." Well, we had a big rain. I don't know what it was growing in but I think we used to put eggshells out there and coffee grounds, too. Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothin'. They're your days. Choke 'em!
I've had a relatively charmed life. I loved to be out in the city. New York was my town. I've had people come up to me and say, 'You're a great New Yorker. You've given your time and money to so many New York charities. You're a great supporter of the arts. I like some of your movies - and some of your movies suck, actually.'
Be ordinary, but bring a quality of awareness to your ordinary life. Bring God to your ordinary life introduce God into your ordinary life. Sleep, eat, love, pray, meditate, but don’t think that you are making or doing something special—and then you will be special.
I went to a foreign land, New York City in 1982 and had no money, no respect in the gym. Everyone thinks you're full of it. The remit in those days was break his heart, get him out of the gym.
Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.
Doing things out of the ordinary - out of the box - like jumping out of airplanes and landing in cities that you've never been to before, then finding your way through. That's the type of trip that excites me.
You never know the biggest day of your life is your biggest day, not until it’s happening. You don’t recognize the biggest day of your life, not until you’re right in the middle of it. The day you commit to something or someone. The day you get your heart broken. The day you meet your soul mate. The day you realize there’s not enough time because you wanna live forever. Those are the biggest days. The perfect days.
...Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice!' 'For how long?' 'O - ever so long. Days and days.' 'Days and days! Only days and days? O, the heart of a man! Days and days!' 'But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not a full-blown love - it was the merest bud - red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in embryo. It never returned.
There's something to be said for useless days. You know, those days when you have nothing to do and all day to do it ... Trust me, a beach and a bottomless drink may not cure the world's problems but it can really get your head in the right place. Those are my favorite kind of days.
It is difficult to wrap your mind around this intellectually and until you've had the experience, it can be difficult to understand. I tell people to give it a shot; you have nothing to lose.
Then we started looking at story and what was making sense and what wasn't making sense, emotionally and thematically the intention that we had a year earlier when they were working on the script, did all that come across? It's all kind of generic things, but it's fascinating and it's weird - I haven't made that many films, but it's weird that every time you think you learn from your mistakes on your last film you have a slew of new mistakes and things that you learn.
God must be a smell, one of those delicious dreamy aromas that float into the soul on the warm hopeful days of spring. What is God must be one of those smells that beguile and inebriate the mind, who like a fine drunken horse of water the heart now rides, galloping wild in every direction like a river flooding right through the topsoil of your youth, cutting and eroding a groove that will be your life, a canyon sunk deep into the virgin plains and unsawn forests of your early days.
I was doing catalog work for a while at 14 and eventually, it was one of those days I was just moving around New York City and I got stopped by an MTV scout and I ended up doing a Jennifer Lopez look-a-like contest and I won that.
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