Colum McCann Quotes

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.

Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the da...

Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of ev...

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it onc...

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best da...

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning ...

It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the ...

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a w...

Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed ...

One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a w...

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it did...

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

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

I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and th...

He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right t...

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and t...

One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The ...

I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that tak...

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

The further away we got from 9/11, the more I wanted to find some way to recover. I wanted to talk a...

All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.

...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because ot...

There are no days more full than those we go back to.

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

She expected no judgement and wanted no pity.

His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own p...

The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American...

We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.

The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no

And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn't happened, and ...

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

An optimist is a braver cynic.

It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.

They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man wh...

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own v...

I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.

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

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories ...

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

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched ...

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, ...

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certai...

I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of o...

We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar s...

The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and...