Colum McCann quotes

Colum McCann is an Irish writer and journalist, acclaimed for his lyrical novels and short stories. His works often explore themes of identity, connection, and the complexities of the human experience. He has received numerous literary awards and continues to inspire readers worldwide. Here are 110 of his quotes:

Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. even of people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, he said, it had to be fought for.

Colum McCann

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.

Colum McCann

Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.

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

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

Colum McCann

He told me once that there is no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along - trying to wound his faith in order to test it - and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

Colum McCann

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

Colum McCann

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

Colum McCann

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.

Colum McCann

I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

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

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

Colum McCann

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

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

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

Colum McCann

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

Colum McCann

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

Colum McCann

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

Colum McCann

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

Colum McCann

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

Colum McCann

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

Colum McCann

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

Colum McCann