“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
“Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.” — 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
I think we're moving toward moments of grace and understanding. And I think these things take time. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small. — 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
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
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
“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
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
“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
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
“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
“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
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
“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
“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
“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
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
“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
“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
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
“If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.” — 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
“At what whirling moment had she halted and turned, unbeknownst to herself, the other way?” — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year! — 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
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Well, I'd say fuck too, if I were me. I'd say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us,… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them.… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“When I was seventeen I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. Hot-potato time. It was prime, no lie. Nothing… — 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
![“Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a…” quote by Colum McCann](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/283/colum-mccann-902_argument_sometimes-we-just-walk-into-something-th_208197.jpg)
