Colum McCann quotes - page 4

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction. (Colum McCann)
You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11. View quote
Colum McCann
Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give. View quote
Colum McCann
He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once. View quote
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. View quote
Colum McCann
She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse. View quote
Colum McCann
How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again. View quote
Colum McCann
So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them. View quote
Colum McCann
This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for. View quote
Colum McCann
The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come. View quote
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--hate your enemy, know nothing of him. (Colum McCann)
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. View quote
Colum McCann
Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty. View quote
Colum McCann
The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy. View quote
Colum McCann
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. View quote
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. View quote
Colum McCann
We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough. View quote
Colum McCann
She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea. View quote
Colum McCann
That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own. View quote
Colum McCann
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. 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 wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. View quote
Colum McCann
Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don't have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us. (Colum McCann)
I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street. View quote
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. View quote
Colum McCann
He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable. View quote
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. View quote
Colum McCann