Top 200 Colum McCann Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely.”

— Colum McCann

152. “When you come into a rich man’s house, the only place to split is in his face.”

— Colum McCann

153. “Then the clouds curtsy in, the rain kneels upon the land, and the weather knocks them back a whole day and a half.”

— Colum McCann

154. “And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn’t happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening.”

— Colum McCann

155. “There are those of us who haven’t yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock – perhaps I must tell it before it is forgotten or becomes like everything else, something else.”

— Colum McCann

156. “The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.”

— Colum McCann

157. “I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.”

— Colum McCann

158. “How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.”

— Colum McCann

159. “Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent.”

— Colum McCann

160. “The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart’s deep need for instruction.”

— Colum McCann

161. “Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrapy your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.”

— Colum McCann

162. “Without you, she wrote in Hebrew, I am without any depth, I am on the surface here, waiting.”

— Colum McCann

163. “The most excellent jihad is that for the conquest of self.”

— Colum McCann

164. “What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.”

— Colum McCann

165. “She had that emigrant’s sadness – she would never go back to her old country – it was gone in more senses than one – but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.”

— Colum McCann

166. “She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn’t interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazzlyn was too. They were like strangers on a porch, Gloria and Jazzlyn, with the evening sun going down: they just sat there together and neither could say what the other one knew, so they just kept quiet, and watched the day descend. One of them said good night, while the other waited.”

— Colum McCann

167. “You have to look on the world with a shine like no one else has.”

— Colum McCann

168. “About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna – as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.”

— Colum McCann

169. “It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.”

— Colum McCann

170. “It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty.”

— Colum McCann

171. “The days hardened like loaves: he ate them without appetite.”

— Colum McCann

172. “I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn’t know before.”

— Colum McCann

173. “In the end, the only things worth doing are the things that might possibly break your heart.”

— Colum McCann

174. “She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.”

— Colum McCann

175. “We are being bought off by our affair with the contemporary drug of choice: ease.”

— Colum McCann

176. “I don’t know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They’re the only thing we have that can trump life itself.”

— Colum McCann

177. “Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.”

— Colum McCann

178. “That’s what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.”

— Colum McCann

179. “The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That’s where the camera came in. It was the unspoken thing between him and the others.”

— Colum McCann

180. “That’s what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.”

— Colum McCann

181. “I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!”

— Colum McCann

182. “Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.”

— Colum McCann

183. “The thing about the Occupation is that it never let you decide. It took away your ability for choice. Banish it and choice would appear.”

— Colum McCann

184. “Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.”

— Colum McCann

185. “Once I thought we could never solve our conflict, we would continue hating each other forever, but it is not written anywhere that we have to go on killing each other. The hero makes a friend of his enemy. That’s my duty. Don’t thank me for doing it. That’s all it is, my duty. When they killed my daughter they killed my fear. I can do anything now.”

— Colum McCann

186. “What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.”

— Colum McCann

187. “It will not be over until we talk.”

— Colum McCann

188. “Bushmills was a Protestant whiskey. Jameson for Catholics.”

— Colum McCann

189. “Failure is good. Failure admits ambition. Failure admits bravery. Failure admits daring. It requires courage to fail and even more courage to know that you’re going to fail... And in the end there’s only one real failure – and that’s the failure to be able to fail. Having tried is the true bravery.”

— Colum McCann

190. “The only true way to expand your world is to inhabit an otherness beyond ourselves. There is one simple word for this: empathy. Don’t let them fool you. Empathy is violent. Empathy is tough. Empathy can rip you open. Once you go there, you can be changed. Get ready: they will label you sentimental. But the truth is that the cynics are the sentimental ones.”

— Colum McCann

191. “Further along, one of Picasso’s doves of peace with an Armalite, not an olive branch, in its mouth.”

— Colum McCann

192. “Stories matter. They send our kids to war. They open up our pockets. They break our hearts.”

— Colum McCann

193. “Sometimes he felt as if the rubber bullet had been travelling a whole decade.”

— Colum McCann

194. “Israeli Defense Force Order 101, Regarding Prohibition of Incitement and Hostile Propaganda Actions, was put into effect in 1967. It forbade Palestinians to use the word Palestine in official documents, to depict or raise or fly their flag, or to make any sort of art that combined the colors of the traditional flag.”

— Colum McCann

195. “They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples.”

— Colum McCann

196. “The men all seemed to want mulligans with their lives.”

— Colum McCann

197. “Memory is three-quarters imagination and all the rest is lies.”

— Colum McCann

198. “How far from real the truth is. I wanted then to take every murdering bastard in Northern Ireland, and have them sleep for a night in my boy’s blue rowboat, out on the lough, in the dark, among the reeds, turning in primal celtic patterns.”

— Colum McCann

199. “Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.”

— Colum McCann

200. “How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.”

— Colum McCann