Colum McCann Quotes

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

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.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.

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

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.

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

I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who 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.

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

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.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

Long ago, long ago. 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.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

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.

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

We have to admire the world for not ending on us.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

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

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.