Quotes from Colum McCann

I was reminded of how years before, he had drifted away from one of our afternoon strolls and got surrounded by the tide - Corrigan, isolated on a sandbar, tangled in light, voices from the shores drifting over him, calling his name.

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

In the end you should probably know your characters as well as you know yourself. Not only what they had for breakfast this morning, but what they wanted to have for breakfast.

The most excellent jihad is that for the conquest of self.

It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.

she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soliders. Lucky Strikes.

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.

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

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

They bobbed back and forth, little Halloween apples.

The only true way to expand your world is to inhabit an otherness beyond ourselves. There is one simple word for this: empathy. Don't let them fool you. Empathy is violent. Empathy is tough. Empathy can rip you open. Once you go there, you can be changed. Get ready: they will label you sentimental. But the truth is that the cynics are the sentimental ones.

Here comes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street.

You have to look on the world with a shine like no one else has.

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 don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

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

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

Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.

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.

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

DAWN UNLOCKED THE MORNING IN INCREMENTS OF GRAY.

She expected no judgement and wanted no pity.

That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.

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

Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.