Colum McCann Quotes

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

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.

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.

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

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.

We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here.

We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip, until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water-it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.