“There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I think we're moving toward moments of grace and understanding. And I think these things take time. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn't a… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water--it has a memory of what it once filled, always… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
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,… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.” — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can’t stop the lines in time, so I’m a… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.” — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity.” — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
