Colum McCann Quotes - Page 3

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.

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.

Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.

There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.

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

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

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

We shape ourselves by our imaginative reach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is always room for at least two truths.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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