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Time Quotes by Colum McCann

46 Time quotes by Colum McCann

All Time quotes Colum McCann’s page

A new arrival feeling New York become theirs in an instant shows how a city can claim you instantly. McCann writes that terror can etch a moment in the mind, and he points out that love is sometimes used just to show hunger. He also says understanding takes time.

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How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.

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“If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.”

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“Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.”

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“In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can’t stop the lines in time, so I’m a…

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I think we're moving toward moments of grace and understanding. And I think these things take time.

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“At what whirling moment had she halted and turned, unbeknownst to herself, the other way?”

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The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

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It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a…

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In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it…

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“He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off…

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“It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to…

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That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they…

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I'd been involved in journalism for a long time - my dad's a journalist, he's written many books, and when I was…

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“Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and…

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Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach…

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I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says,…

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“The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft…

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“You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind…

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Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we…

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The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We…

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I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to…

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I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us,…

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“Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to…

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Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them.…

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“For a moment I felt a vicious hatred for him and his quiet ways, his mundane stroll through the summer, his ordinariness,…

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“What happened then was that, for an instant, almost nothing happened. He wasn't even there. Failure didn't even cross his mind. It…

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So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

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

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“It's hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but…

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“She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of…

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There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once…

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“Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there,…

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He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off…

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The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it,…

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And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This…

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Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years,…

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“It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn't want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the…

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“The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the…

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Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug…

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More by Colum McCann

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

“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…

“The short sharp shock of three thousand mother two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead…

I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if…

“Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.”

“How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.”

“She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity.”

Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get…

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy;…

“Bits of it floating in the air, he said. "It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's…

“He has read whole volumes on the philosophy of nonviolence. How peace had to be understood in all its moral dimensions. The proper coexistence…

“She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it…

I'm of the opinion that the real is imagined and the imagined is quite real. The real is imagined, in the sense that we…

“She had that emigrant’s sadness—she would never go back to her old country—it was gone in more senses than one—but she was forever gazing…