Quotes by Colum McCann

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

Im only telling you on the truth, he said. If you cant stand the truth, dont ask for it.

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

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.

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 dont attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps its a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

Thats what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.

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

Gloria laughed at them and said that she’d overtaken grief a long time ago, that 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.

Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes. Corrigan stopped him as he made his way up the stairs. Where dyou think youre going?Our father gripped the bannister. His hands were liverspotted and I could see him trembling in his pause. Thats not your room, sad Corrigan. Our father tottered on the stairs. He took another step up. Dont, said my brother. His voice was clear, full, confidant. Our father stood stunned. He climbed one more step and then turned, descended, looked around, lost.My own sons, he said.We made a bed for him on a sofa in the living room, but even then Corrigan refused to stay under the same roof; he went walking in the direction of the city center and I wondered what alley he might be found in later that night, what fist he might walk into, whose bottle he might climb down inside.

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

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobodys perfect.

The repeated lies become history, but they dont necessarily become the truth.

Pains nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.

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 chickll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

She wanted to tell him so much, 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. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

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

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

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

We seldom know what were hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

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