Quotes from Colum McCann

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

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

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

Once we had filled each other with desire, not remembrance.

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.

There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past.

It (NY) was like the city that Lot left behind and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.

Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks.

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

At what whirling moment had she halted and turned, unbeknownst to herself, the other way?

It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences.

Recklessness and freedom - how did they become a cocktail?

Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.

He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.

He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father's father?

Was there not wage slavery? Were there not the chains of financial oppression?

it is not true that we have only one life to live. If we dwell in literature we can have as many lives as we want.

The German writer Goethe said that the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music—that to look upon a thing is to hear it. Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architecture is frozen music. 131

At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own.

she wondered if she owned a faint idea of many things, and a strong idea of only a few. As if she had developed an immunity to depth. That she only, now, skimmed the surface.

It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn't want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn't want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.

I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me.

only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself.

Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice. There are years accumulated in a sound.