Top 200 Colum McCann Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.”

— Colum McCann

102. “It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.”

— Colum McCann

103. “Pain’s nothing. Pain’s what you give, not what you get.”

— Colum McCann

104. “How very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.”

— Colum McCann

105. “We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.”

— Colum McCann

106. “It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left.”

— Colum McCann

107. “I have nobody left to whom I can tell the story.”

— Colum McCann

108. “As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.”

— Colum McCann

109. “He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.”

— Colum McCann

110. “The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.”

— Colum McCann

111. “So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.”

— Colum McCann

112. “And when you go around in circles, brother, the world is very big, but if you plow straight ahead it’s small enough.”

— Colum McCann

113. “An optimist is a braver cynic.”

— Colum McCann

114. “They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick’ll be able to reach in and grab his heart.”

— Colum McCann

115. “Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don’t have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.”

— Colum McCann

116. “It’s nonviolence that is hard to deal with, whether coming from Israelis or Palestinians or both. It’s confusing to them.”

— Colum McCann

117. “I don’t really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don’t know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It’s all about language, it’s all about how you apply it to the page.”

— Colum McCann

118. “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

119. “So many times people would come up to him after his lectures and say that they wished there were more like him. What do you mean? he would ask. Immediately they would realize what they had said and drop their heads. As if he didn’t encounter people like himself every single day, at every single angle. As if he were the only sort of Palestinian they could stomach.”

— Colum McCann

120. “We do not talk about peace, we make peace.”

— Colum McCann

121. “Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.”

— Colum McCann

122. “The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.”

— Colum McCann

123. “I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and end right there, at the moment of laughter, but things don’t begin and end really, I suppose; they just keep on going.”

— Colum McCann

124. “The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.”

— Colum McCann

125. “Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.”

— Colum McCann

126. “He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried.”

— Colum McCann

127. “She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.”

— Colum McCann

128. “So many people considered Rami a traitor, a lackey, a turncoat, but in the end he didn’t care: he knew what he was doing, he knew he was getting under their skin, he was peeling it back, exposing the rawness. He was outnumbered, yes, but they would find a tipping point sometime, somewhere, along the way. It was inevitable. He had to keep telling the story. Repeating it again and again and again.”

— Colum McCann

129. “Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.”

— Colum McCann

130. “In the end you should probably know your characters as well as you know yourself. Not only what they had for breakfast this morning, but what they wanted to have for breakfast.”

— Colum McCann

131. “I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.”

— Colum McCann

132. “I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.”

— Colum McCann

133. “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

134. “It’s the sort of hum that makes you feel that you’re the actual ground lying under the sky, a blue hum that’s all above and around you, but if you think about it too hard it will get too loud or big, and make you feel no more than just a speck.”

— Colum McCann

135. “Rami often felt that there were nine or ten Israelis inside him, fighting. The conflicted one. The shamed one. The enamored one. The bereaved one. The one who marveled at the blimp’s invention. The one who knew the blimp was watching. The one watching back. The one who wanted to be watched. The anarchist. The protester. The one sick and tired of all the seeing.”

— Colum McCann

136. “A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.”

— Colum McCann

137. “Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.”

— Colum McCann

138. “And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us?”

— Colum McCann

139. “You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!”

— Colum McCann

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

— Colum McCann

141. “I suppose I’ve always known that it’s hard to be just one person. the key is in the door and it can always be opened.”

— Colum McCann

142. “Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.”

— Colum McCann

143. “The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don’t go.”

— Colum McCann

144. “The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.”

— Colum McCann

145. “Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly.”

— Colum McCann

146. “Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.”

— Colum McCann

147. “Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow.”

— Colum McCann

148. “I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.”

— Colum McCann

149. “The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.”

— Colum McCann

150. “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 shape our stories, so anything that even happens on the news gets shaped in a certain way and gets a texture, and that the imagined can be real.”

— Colum McCann