Novel Quotes by Colum McCann

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

— 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…

— Colum McCann

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

— 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. But if…

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

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

— 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;…

— Colum McCann

“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…

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

“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…

— Colum McCann

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…

— Colum McCann

“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…

— Colum McCann