Quotes from Colum McCann

There is nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty of the world than language.

Het enige wat je over oorlog moet weten, zoon, is: Niet gaan. "The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don't go.

A swan can be as fatal to the pilot as a rocket-propelled grenade.

Puurheid in beweging.

Haar kuitspieren waren glad en gewelfd.

A book is completed only when its finished by a reader.

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.

The overexamined life, Claire, it's not worth living.

He was aware, he said, that humiliation was a deep wound. We are Semitic, both of us, Israelis and Palestinians together.

Mesdames, un conseil. Si vous cherchez un homme beau, riche et intelligent... Prenez-en trois ! lol

where he might variously be called a terrorist or a martyr or a murderer or a guerrilla or a freedom fighter

I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen--how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.

I have come to think of our lives as the colors of that place- hers a piece of bog cotton, mine as black as the water found when men slash too deep in the soil with a shovel.

He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground.

the Palestinian colors. White our deeds, black our battles, green our fields, red our swords.

There are moments we return to. We are in theme. We rest there and there is nothing else.

Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for

The wind surged in a roar, then died down like it was pondering some heavy shit, then started back up like before.

It was that time of the evening when Beit Jala willed itself to cool down: the land breathed, the sun dipped, the birds rose, the hills took on a sudden burst of dark green.

Being with you, and not being with you, is the only way I have to measure time. ~ BORGES ~

all walls were destined to fall, no matter what.

All around, the applause of the city, in the leaves and the trees and buildings, and a red-tail hawk shooting over the courts, and some clouds skillful overhead in the blue, and the babysitter in the background, rocking the carriage, and he had the fleeting desire to make the phone calls to Stormont, leave it all at deuce.

When a suicide bomber activates his or her belt, his head is nearly always separated from the top of the torso: it is known to the police as the mushroom effect.

The only interesting thing, said François Mitterrand, is to live.