Top 250 Colum McCann Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Here comes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street.”

— Colum McCann

203. “What was it Pascal had written? All of our problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

— Colum McCann

204. “When he returned from the war he said to Nurit that he wasn’t sure that all of him had come home.”

— Colum McCann

205. “As I have always said, it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.”

— Colum McCann

206. “Not a single atom in our bodies today was there when we were children. Every bit of us has been replaced many times over. We flake away and become new. Whatever we are now, we are not the stuff from which we were originally made. All the people we once were. All the people we had once hoped to be.”

— Colum McCann

207. “He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted – it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his fingers.”

— Colum McCann

208. “We are running from our pain to our pain.”

— Colum McCann

209. “People can look different from hour to hour depending on the angle of daylight.”

— Colum McCann

210. “Save us from enormities whether open or hidden.”

— Colum McCann

211. “When he got home, he said: “The first thing you lose in war is the truth.”

— Colum McCann

212. “He was aware, he said, that humiliation was a deep wound. We are Semitic, both of us, Israelis and Palestinians together.”

— Colum McCann

213. “Said, who was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1935, was fond of T. S. Eliot’s idea that reality could not be deprived of the other echoes that inhabit the garden.”

— Colum McCann

214. “He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction.”

— Colum McCann

215. “The reason a falcon is hooded is exactly the reason a falconer is not: the birds can see so well that they would most likely be distracted by other prey much further away. The falconer hoods the bird and waits. He wants the falcon to only see what he sees.”

— Colum McCann

216. “The truth is kaleidoscopic, it has many mirrors, and it can be viewed from a variety of angles.”

— Colum McCann

217. “When a great truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it.”

— Colum McCann

218. “A swan can be as fatal to the pilot as a rocket-propelled grenade.”

— Colum McCann

219. “Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid, even acid. 465 It disrupts the forces of attraction that hold molecules together.”

— Colum McCann

220. “We have words but sometimes they’re not enough.”

— Colum McCann

221. “Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity: General George S. Patton.”

— Colum McCann

222. “In their familiarity, they had developed a dislike for each other.”

— Colum McCann

223. “We’re just not convinced that’s the right path. It’s not a path, it’s a fact.”

— Colum McCann

224. “Up the steps he goes, into the drab office block. A heaviness in the corridors. He walks along, shaking hands, touching shoulders. He knows every single one of their names. They are polite, deferent – scared, too. If they are to own it, they are also the ones to lose it. A valuable thing. Once in a thousand years. Peace.”

— Colum McCann

225. “He was not interested in absolving the attackers, but he had to admit if he had been born under the same circumstances he would undoubtedly have become a fighter himself, maybe even the same sort of man who had murdered his son.”

— Colum McCann

226. “The most casual things can, after all, twist our tired hearts.”

— Colum McCann

227. “Perhaps she could use the sounds, punctuate them with some of the other birdsong she had taped, but the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that sound was something to leave alone, that it was not the bulldozers nor the olive trees nor the buzzing strobe lights that needed attention, but the quietness itself.”

— Colum McCann

228. “A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.”

— Colum McCann

229. “It’s a tragedy that we need to continually prove that we are human beings.”

— Colum McCann

230. “Know your enemy, know yourself.”

— Colum McCann

231. “She had formed a distrust of men who carried Bibles. It seemed to her that they believed their own voices were somehow embedded there.”

— Colum McCann

232. “They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead.”

— Colum McCann

233. “He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.”

— Colum McCann

234. “In Jewish tradition it is forbidden to throw away writings invoking the name of God. Prayer books. Scrolls. Encyclopedias. Garments. Tefillin straps. Even pamphlets or cartoon books. Instead of being destroyed, the texts are interred in a genizah, a burial place for the written word.”

— Colum McCann

235. “In America you could lose everything except the memory of your original name.”

— Colum McCann

236. “Everything gets fixed and we all stay broken.”

— Colum McCann

237. “It was, he knew, their isolation that had made them so vocal. They thrived in the grandeur of their rage. Yet, underneath their masks they were riddled with self doubt. He could sense the fear behind the clenched jaw.”

— Colum McCann

238. “It was the sort of hospital that needed its own hospital.”

— Colum McCann

239. “The truth of the matter is that the light at the end of the tunnel generally belongs to the pharmaceutical companies.”

— Colum McCann

240. “Still, an agility lurks underneath, a wiry surprise, as if he might burst away from the limp at any moment and leave it abandoned behind him.”

— Colum McCann

241. “On the back of Sir Richard Frances Burton’s compass he engraved an inscription from the Qur’an: Travel through the earth and see what was the end of those who rejected Truth.”

— Colum McCann

242. “We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent.”

— Colum McCann

243. “Nothing, he knew, was ever free.”

— Colum McCann

244. “He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity.”

— Colum McCann

245. “I suppose we go out to sea because we want, eventually, to come home. I know this now, but it was new to me then. The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.”

— Colum McCann

246. “The essential question that he wanted to ask Freud was if he thought it might be possible to guide the psychological development of humankind so that it became resistant to the psychoses of hate and destruction, thereby delivering civilisation from the hovering menace of war.”

— Colum McCann

247. “On describing balding – “wild emigrating hair.”

— Colum McCann

248. “It was no great surprise that the world felt as if it were in chains since they actually trawled the ocean floor and tied us up in easy knots.”

— Colum McCann

249. “The only interesting thing is to live.”

— Colum McCann

250. “If Abir had not gone, she would not need to be remembered. Her absence, then, was her presence.”

— Colum McCann