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Stills Quotes by Colum McCann

8 Stills quotes by Colum McCann

All Stills quotes Colum McCann’s page

Colum McCann’s voice often lingers on the edges of moments that pause, and this brief set of eight quotes captures that lingering feeling. If you’re drawn to how a simple still can hold a story, these lines give a quick, resonant glimpse into his perspective.

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

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She wanted to tell him so mach, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and…

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I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared…

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I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in…

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Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

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I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There…

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There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history,…

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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

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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.

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“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…

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

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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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“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…

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

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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 landing it…

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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…

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“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…

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