Colum Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Colum Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
You're manic-depressive and you're manic-depressive too and you, you're definitely manic-depressive, girl. And you over there in the corner, you're just plain fucking depressive.— Colum McCann
The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.— Colum McCann
That he'd see the light and it'd still be in a tunnel.— Colum McCann
She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It's all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.— Colum McCann
Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.— Colum McCann
She might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.— Colum McCann
...there was always hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent,as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so.— Colum McCann
Some days he wishes that he could simply empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow— Colum McCann
not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes.
I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.— Colum McCann
The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away, like an ancient word stepping off a page.— Colum McCann
There are no days more full than those we go back to.— Colum McCann
The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.— Colum McCann
Her smile could've broken glass.— Colum McCann
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— Mccann Colum
hate your enemy, know nothing of him.
They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who'd soon turn into empty chairs.— Colum McCann
I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.— Colum McCann
No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.— Colum McCann
Kenna wet her lips and swallowed hard. The off-white linen of Colum's tunic made his wide expanse of hard-muscled chest and squared shoulders look as though the man had been dipped in white chocolate. Damn, I love white chocolate. Kenna licked her lips again. But she'd bet her favorite nail polish that a taste of Colum would bean any chocolate she'd ever eaten.— Maeve Greyson
I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.— Colum McCann
Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.— Colum McCann
What was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves if incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other.— Colum McCann
Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.— Colum McCann
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.— Colum McCann
When I was seventeen I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. Hot-potato time. It was prime, no lie. Nothing in the wrong place. I had legs a hundred miles long and a booty to die for. Adam woulda said to Eve, "Eve, I'm leaving you, honey," and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, "Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker.— Colum McCann
Sometimes you've got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.— Colum McCann
Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.— Colum McCann
A brand-new thought: Transatlantic airmail. She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over, transatlantic, trans atlas, trans antic. The distance finally broken.— Colum McCann
The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie's jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain.— Colum McCann
Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.— Colum McCann
Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [ ... ] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.— Colum McCann
I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.— Colum McCann
She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father's cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had always refused him that.— Colum McCann
There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.— Colum McCann
So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.— Colum McCann
I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.— Colum McCann
There's a high that you get when you're writing code. It's cool. It's easy to do. You forget your mom, your dad, everything. You've got the whole country onboard. This is America. You hit the frontier. You can go anywhere. It's about being connected, access, gateways, like a whispering game where if you get one thing wrong you've got to go all the way back to the beginning.— Colum McCann
It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.— Colum McCann
I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.— Colum McCann
The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no— Colum McCann
Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.— Colum McCann
Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.— Colum McCann
It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.— Colum McCann
Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly.— Colum McCann
At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.— Colum McCann
The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure.— Colum McCann
What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.— Colum McCann
He was not beyond knowing that they thought him - when he first arrived - a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. He wasn't interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible.— Colum McCann
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.— Colum McCann
Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.— Colum McCann
Death by drowning, death by snakebite ... death by memory loss, death by claymore ... death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game ... death by authority, death by isolation, death by genocide, death by Kennedy ... death by signature, death by silence ... death by performance— Colum McCann
An optimist is a braver cynic.— Colum McCann
Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.— Colum McCann
I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love.— Colum McCann
People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.— Colum McCann
The wind surged in a roar, then died down like it was pondering some heavy shit, then started back up like before.— Colum McCann
He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground.— Colum McCann
The further away we got from 9/11, the more I wanted to find some way to recover. I wanted to talk about the more anonymous corners of the city, because I think it's very important that not all of that anger was turned to revenge.— Colum McCann
I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.— Colum McCann
I suppose I've always known that it's hard to be just one person. the key is in the door and it can always be opened.— Colum McCann
He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along— Colum McCann
trying to wound his faith in order to test it
and I was just another stone in the way of his God.
I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.— Colum McCann
He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.— Colum McCann
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 shouldn't.— Colum McCann
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 wrapy your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.— Colum McCann
It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences.— Colum McCann
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.— Colum McCann
In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.— Colum McCann
He was Loki, a being who only half belonged to the Gods; his father was the Wind Giant.— Padraic Colum
But being rational about it didn't cure it.— Colum McCann
There are moments we return to. We are in theme. We rest there and there is nothing else.— Colum McCann
You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!— Colum McCann
My wardrobe is drab. I could spend six weeks in the same jeans. Most everything I have is blue or black, but certainly not cool.— Colum McCann
They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead.— Colum McCann
They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.— Colum McCann
Do feel free to call upon me. My discretion may be relied upon, I do assure you." He bowed quaintly from his saddle. "To the same extent as your loyalty to Colum MacKenzie?" I said, arching my brows. The small brown eyes met mine full on, and I saw both the cleverness and the humor that lurked in their faded depths. "Ah, weel," he said, without apology. "Worth a try.— Diana Gabaldon
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.— Colum McCann
I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.— Colum McCann
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.— Colum McCann
They entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger.— Colum McCann
Claire wants to say: Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all once, twice, three times. But all she does is smile at Marcia and give her what she hopes is a nod that understands that it's absolutely no problem to say fuck, on Park Avenue, on a Wednesday, at a coffee morning, in fact it's probably the best thing to say, given the circumstances, maybe they should all say it in unison, make a singsong out of it.— Colum McCann
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.— Colum McCann
There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.— Colum McCann
He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father's father?— Colum McCann
One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.— Colum McCann
She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.— Colum McCann
To Meath of the pastures,— Padraic Colum
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford,
Go my cattle and me.
...only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself.— Colum McCann
I'd been involved in journalism for a long time - my dad's a journalist, he's written many books, and when I was twelve years old I wrote reports on local football matches for the newspapers.— Colum McCann
The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, have become it.— Colum McCann
Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.— Colum McCann
At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own.— Colum McCann
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.— Colum McCann
Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.— Colum McCann
— Colum McCann
Are you saying I'm a liar?
No I'm just, like, speaking.
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.— Colum McCann
The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.— Colum McCann
We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here.— Colum McCann
The overexamined life... It's not worth living.— Colum McCann
There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.— Colum McCann
And it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.— Colum McCann
