Colum McCann quotes - page 2

He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last. (Colum McCann)
There is always room for at least two truths. View quote
Colum McCann
With all respects to heaven, I like it here. View quote
Colum McCann
Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't. View quote
Colum McCann
The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last. View quote
Colum McCann
The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall. View quote
Colum McCann
Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again. View quote
Colum McCann
Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me. View quote
Colum McCann
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. View quote
Colum McCann
And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt. View quote
Colum McCann
...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise. (Colum McCann)
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. View quote
Colum McCann
He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic. View quote
Colum McCann
If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures. View quote
Colum McCann
The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before. View quote
Colum McCann
Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world's oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons. View quote
Colum McCann
He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NE YORK FUCKIN' CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would. View quote
Colum McCann
Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar. View quote
Colum McCann
New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddamn about what it left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey. View quote
Colum McCann
You know, when you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again. View quote
Colum McCann
He believed in walking beautifully, elegantly. It had to work as a kind of faith that he would get to the other side. He had fallen once while training - once exactly, so he felt it couldn't happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary anyway. In any work of beauty there had to be one small thread left hanging. (Colum McCann)
Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They're not Magdalenes. You're just a bum among them. You're looking for the poor man within? Why don't you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people? View quote
Colum McCann
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 niche and make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can. View quote
Colum McCann
You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time. But there it was again, the girl's spreading bloodstain. View quote
Colum McCann
There are no days more full than those we go back to. View quote
Colum McCann