Colum McCann

“The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.”

— Colum McCann

If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.

— Colum McCann

“One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.”

— Colum McCann

“Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.”

— Colum McCann

“The quiet lines matter as much as the noisy ones.”

— Colum McCann

Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.

— Colum McCann

“--I'm not God. --Then find someone who is, man.”

— Colum McCann

“We are being bought off by our affair with the contemporary drug of choice: ease.”

— Colum McCann

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself,…

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a…

— Colum McCann

“The watchers below pulled their breath in all at once. The air suddenly felt shared. The man above was a word they…

— Colum McCann

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

— Colum McCann

“It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.”

— Colum McCann

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

— Colum McCann

“The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what…

— 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…

— Colum McCann

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was…

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

“...while the others--those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther--felt viable now with…

— Colum McCann

If you sort of see yourself writing into a space that you don't always recognize, you sometimes learn things that you knew,…

— Colum McCann

“I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student – thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of…

— Colum McCann

“wash your dress in running water. dry it on the southern side of a rock. let them have four guesses and make…

— colum mccann

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

— Colum McCann

“The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in…

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

“Some days he wishes that he could simply empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short…

— Colum McCann

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday...he consoled himself with the…

— Colum McCann

“Recklessness and freedom - how did they become a cocktail?”

— Colum McCann

“There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again.”

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

We shape ourselves by our imaginative reach.

— Colum McCann

I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.

— Colum McCann

You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven...

— Colum McCann

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

— Colum McCann