Quotes from Colum McCann

So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.

To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn't a hippie idea. Both of us always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from hippies. We were the edge, the definers.

I'm not God. --Then find someone who is, man.

Darkness doesn't fall, he thought as he swayed to the radio, it rises up from the bottom of the sea and begins to breathe around us.

The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.

she might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.

He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.

We seldom know what we're 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.

Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there.

So many times people would come up to him after his lectures and say that they wished there were more like him. What do you mean? he would ask. Immediately they would realize what they had said and drop their heads. As if he didn't encounter people like himself every single day, at every single angle. As if he were the only sort of Palestinian they could stomach.

Rain fell more steadily now. Grey and unrelenting. Nobody seemed to notice. Rain on the puddles. Rain on the high brickwork. Rain on the slate roofs. Rain on the rain itself.

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

He was there, he said, to raise just a single hat, but eventually that hat would raise the heavens. He would go forth as a slave no more.

To summon things into being by the mysterious alchemy of language. Atlantic. Atlas. Aloft. He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.

He was the son of his son--he was here, he was left behind.

He could be in any mood or any place and, unbidden, it returned.

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.

Wenn wir gehen, nehmen wir unsere Heimat mit.

That he'd see the light and it'd still be in a tunnel.

It's nonviolence that is hard to deal with, whether coming from Israelis or Palestinians or both. It's confusing to them.

He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place. and he was in the habit of hoping for it.

I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love.

At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.

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