Quotes from Colum McCann

Wir stolpern dahin, tragen ein wenig Geräusch in die Stille und wirken in anderen fort.

Stories matter. They send our kids to war. They open up our pockets. They break our hearts.

It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.

Everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.

Bushmills was a Protestant whiskey. Jameson for Catholics.

Failure is good. Failure admits ambition. Failure admits bravery. Failure admits daring. It requires courage to fail and even more courage to know that you're going to fail...And in the end there's only one real failure - and that's the failure to be able to fail. Having tried is the true bravery.

In Jewish tradition it is forbidden to throw away writings invoking the name of God. Prayer books. Scrolls. Encyclopedias. Garments. Tefillin straps. Even pamphlets or cartoon books. Instead of being destroyed, the texts are interred in a genizah, a burial place for the written word.

Why did you leave the horse alone? —To keep the house company, my son. ~ MAHMOUD DARWISH

My father had been silent most of the time. He kissed my cheek. He told me that not many people were ordering hand-painted signs anymore, that they were all going neon, but if he had one sign he could put on the world he would say that he was Gloria's father.

The reason a falcon is hooded is exactly the reason a falconer is not: the birds can see so well that they would most likely be distracted by other prey much further away. The falconer hoods the bird and waits. He wants the falcon to only see what he sees.

it was forbidden to tread with your feet on the name of G-d.

He was not interested in absolving the attackers, but he had to admit if he had been born under the same circumstances he would undoubtedly have become a fighter himself, maybe even the same sort of man who had murdered his son.

the way he spoke was magical, but after a while even his voice began to grate and he began to remind me of the colors of the walls in the hotel rooms in which he stayed...

I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other's breath.

Besides, I loved the sound of the gallop. On mornings, before the races, I would walk down among the stalls and breathe in all the scents of the hay and the soap and the saddle leather.

One corner to another. One more crack in the pavement. That's the way we all walk: the more we have to occupy our minds the better.

The mailman carried around huge bags of gloom.

Every time a branch of mine got to being a decent size, that wind just came along and broke it.

They have a deep need just to talk, just to tell a story, however small or reckless.

Nothing was simple, certainly not simplification.

Listening to these people is like listening to trees—sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.

He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn't count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn't figure out how many crosses to go into the ground.

The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

On the back of Sir Richard Frances Burton's compass he engraved an inscription from the Qur'an: Travel through the earth and see what was the end of those who rejected Truth.