Top 200 Colum McCann Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple – hate your enemy, know nothing of him.”

— Colum McCann

52. “The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.”

— Colum McCann

53. “I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.”

— Colum McCann

54. “She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs – she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.”

— Colum McCann

55. “We have to admire the world for not ending on us.”

— Colum McCann

56. “I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.”

— Colum McCann

57. “Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.”

— Colum McCann

58. “We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don’t attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it’s a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.”

— Colum McCann

59. “I told him that I loved him and that I’d always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.”

— Colum McCann

60. “They entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger.”

— Colum McCann

61. “She wanted to tell him so mach, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create.”

— Colum McCann

62. “The stars looked like nail heads in the sky – pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.”

— Colum McCann

63. “The quiet lines matter as much as the noisy ones.”

— Colum McCann

64. “I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love.”

— Colum McCann

65. “Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.”

— Colum McCann

66. “Was there not wage slavery? Were there not the chains of financial oppression?”

— Colum McCann

67. “Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.”

— Colum McCann

68. “She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.”

— Colum McCann

69. “Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.”

— Colum McCann

70. “Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water.”

— Colum McCann

71. “One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.”

— Colum McCann

72. “A bi gezunt, his mother would have said. She was always one for the ancient phrase. You have your health, what more do you want? –.”

— Colum McCann

73. “What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth – the filth, the war, the poverty – was that life could be capable of small beauties.”

— Colum McCann

74. “He looks like the sort of man who can’t afford to leave, and doesn’t want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.”

— Colum McCann

75. “Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.”

— Colum McCann

76. “I have the most charmed, most – I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.”

— Colum McCann

77. “There isn’t a story in the world that isn’t in part, at least, addressed to the past.”

— Colum McCann

78. “I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.”

— Colum McCann

79. “Ullmann had once written that the secret of every work of art was the annihilation of matter through form.”

— Colum McCann

80. “Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That’s why they became evil. That’s why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn’t matter – it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”

— Colum McCann

81. “What was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves if incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other.”

— Colum McCann

82. “It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.”

— Colum McCann

83. “And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.”

— Colum McCann

84. “Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don’t function for what things aren’t.”

— Colum McCann

85. “The conspiracy of women. We are in it together, make no mistake.”

— Colum McCann

86. “I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they’re the things that matter.”

— Colum McCann

87. “Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.”

— Colum McCann

88. “His theme was happiness – what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.”

— Colum McCann

89. “Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.”

— Colum McCann

90. “Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.”

— Colum McCann

91. “There’s a high that you get when you’re writing code. It’s cool. It’s easy to do. You forget your mom, your dad, everything. You’ve got the whole country onboard. This is America. You hit the frontier. You can go anywhere. It’s about being connected, access, gateways, like a whispering game where if you get one thing wrong you’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning.”

— Colum McCann

92. “At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he’d been sure that one day he’d be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you’d make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own.”

— Colum McCann

93. “Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound.”

— Colum McCann

94. “The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure.”

— Colum McCann

95. “He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.”

— Colum McCann

96. “The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.”

— Colum McCann

97. “We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.”

— Colum McCann

98. “If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.”

— Colum McCann

99. “He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father’s father?”

— Colum McCann

100. “One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.”

— Colum McCann