A Quote by Colum McCann

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.
My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship.
You know, it comes from my mother's side of the family. She had seven sisters and one brother, and all of them could play instruments. I suppose I picked it up from that.
I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother--both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child's history is never finished.
My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.
Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.
Music was around in my family in two ways. My mother would occasionally sing to me, but I was mostly stimulated by the classical music my father had left behind. I had an ear for music, I suppose, so that's what began my interest in music.
This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
Every time I look at it, It looks back at me I love the sea, its waters are blue And the sky is too And the sea is very dear to me If when I grow up and the sea is still there Then I’ll open my eyes and smell the fresh air Because the sea is very dear to me The sea is very calm and that’s why I like it there The sand is brand new and the wind blows in my hair And the sea is very dear to me.
It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.
As a mother in the 1950s, she did not impose the same strict religious routine on myself and my brother, Mark, though we were taken to church and Sunday school.
I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else
We are now integrated into American society and I don't like the word fashionable, because fashionable means that it's going to pass. It's not like that anymore.
In your bed tonight, turn off all of the lights and make sure that there is no noise. There is something that you will hear. It is probably that branch slapping the window but you better believe that your mind is going to go to some sick individual tapping on the glass because he wants to get your attention to come to the window for when you do you will be grabbed through it and pulled outside. That happens to me all of the time.
Loud wind, strong wind, sweeping o'er the mountains, Fresh wind, free wind, blowing from the sea, Pour forth thy vials like streams from airy mountains, Draughts of life to me.
But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror even then of 'Oh my God, we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do
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