Quotes from Colum McCann

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max's Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn't get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another. if only we had been so careful with ourselves.

Their reflection in the glass. The water behind them stretched distant and black. I stood in the doorway a long, long time, unsure of what to do or say. I wasn't interested in their

Rami said to the audience that all walls were destined to fall, no matter what. He was not so naïve, though, to believe that more would not be built. It was a world of walls. Still, it was his job to insert a crack in the one most visible to him.

They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead.

When I was seventeen I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. Hot-potato time. It was prime, no lie. Nothing in the wrong place. I had legs a hundred miles long and a booty to die for. Adam woulda said to Eve, Eve, I'm leaving you, honey, and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker.

although i know that a wall to happiness is expecting too much happiness

There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again.

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 finge

Memory is three-quarters imagination and all the rest is lies.

Truth: When criticized you go berserk, but in your defense remember that it is those who calmly listen who never change.

Her smile colud've broen glass.

On describing balding - wild emigrating hair

Her smile could've broken glass.

There's a high that you get when you're writing code. It's cool. It's easy to do. You forget your mom, your dad, everything. You've got the whole country onboard. This is America. You hit the frontier. You can go anywhere. It's about being connected, access, gateways, like a whispering game where if you get one thing wrong you've got to go all the way back to the beginning.

Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water.

Sometimes he felt as if the rubber bullet had been travelling a whole decade.

What mystery we lose when we figure things out, but perhaps there's a mystery in the obvious, too.

His theme was happiness—what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.

But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely.

A bi gezunt, his mother would have said. She was always one for the ancient phrase. You have your health, what more do you want? —

If Abir had not gone, she would not need to be remembered. Her absence, then, was her presence.

She had that emigrant's sadness—she would never go back to her old country—it was gone in more senses than one—but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.

If you think of the world without people it's about the most perfect thing there ever is. It's all balanced and shit. But then come the people, and they fuck it up.

He was standing on the little ledge of reality he had left, but it seemed to me that he wasn't getting high, just getting level. He had an affinity with pain. If he couldn't cure it, he took it on.