Top 200 Colum McCann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.”

— Colum McCann

2. “The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”

— Colum McCann

3. “Whatever you say, say nothing.”

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

5. “Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.”

— Colum McCann

6. “There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water – it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.”

— Colum McCann

7. “The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth.”

— Colum McCann

8. “Good days, they come around the oddest corners.”

— Colum McCann

9. “Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there. -Rumi.”

— Colum McCann

10. “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, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.”

— Colum McCann

11. “I’m only telling you on the truth,” he said. “If you can’t stand the truth, don’t ask for it.”

— Colum McCann

12. “There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.”

— Colum McCann

13. “In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

— Colum McCann

14. “The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.”

— Colum McCann

15. “This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.”

— Colum McCann

16. “I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.”

— Colum McCann

17. “People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don’t. There’s no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.”

— Colum McCann

18. “He might have been naive, but he didn’t care; he said he’s rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.”

— Colum McCann

19. “Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.”

— Colum McCann

20. “The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.”

— Colum McCann

21. “I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.”

— Colum McCann

22. “If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.”

— Colum McCann

23. “Even if you’re going to die, you might as well die pretty.”

— Colum McCann

24. “For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.”

— Colum McCann

25. “Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.”

— Colum McCann

26. “People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.”

— Colum McCann

27. “She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.”

— Colum McCann

28. “It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one’s mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.”

— Colum McCann

29. “There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.”

— Colum McCann

30. “When you divide death by life you find a circle.”

— Colum McCann

31. “The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.”

— Colum McCann

32. “The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.”

— Colum McCann

33. “We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.”

— Colum McCann

34. “In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There’s the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.”

— Colum McCann

35. “He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they’re hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.”

— Colum McCann

36. “Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.”

— Colum McCann

37. “There are no days more full than those we go back to.”

— Colum McCann

38. “Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.”

— Colum McCann

39. “You can count the dead, but you can’t count the cost. We’ve got no math for Heaven...”

— Colum McCann

40. “There is always room for at least two truths.”

— Colum McCann

41. “So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.”

— Colum McCann

42. “Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.”

— Colum McCann

43. “It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.”

— Colum McCann

44. “He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along – trying to wound his faith in order to test it – and I was just another stone in the way of his God.”

— Colum McCann

45. “Rami, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it’s crazy.”

— Colum McCann

46. “With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

48. “Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.”

— Colum McCann

49. “Nobody falls halfway.”

— Colum McCann

50. “The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie’s jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain.”

— Colum McCann