Quotes from Colum McCann

Perhaps she could use the sounds, punctuate them with some of the other birdsong she had taped, but the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that sound was something to leave alone, that it was not the bulldozers nor the olive trees nor the buzzing strobe lights that needed attention, but the quietness itself.

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

The Greek word clepsydra, given to ancient water clocks, comes from the amalgamation of the Greek words for water and to steal.

Someone or other was going to get torn asunder. And yet why shouldn't they fall in love, if even just for a short while.

she wanted to find a place within the sounds where nobody could find her.

it struck me that maybe the young girl had just been a prostitute. I felt a momentary sigh of gratitude, and then the awareness stopped me cold, the walls pulsed in on me. How cheap was I?

He let the pieces of the napkin flutter to the floor and said something strange about words being good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.

The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward. No

Survival, in fact, is about the connection between things. [Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism]

It's like moving through a delicious fog.

I don't know the words for how she looked at me -- there are few words -- it was a welling up, a rising, a lifting up on the surface from the water; it was the sort of thing that could not be told.

Everything falls into the hands of music eventually. The only thing that ever rescued me was listening to a big voice.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is.

He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.

After Schächter's final performance, Eichmann is reported to have said: Those crazy Jews, singing their own requiem.

Said, who was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1935, was fond of T. S. Eliot's idea that reality could not be deprived of the other echoes that inhabit the garden.

She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father's cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had always refused him that.

We're just not convinced that's the right path. It's not a path, it's a fact.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

Hillel the Elder, author, in the first century before Christ, of the ethic of reciprocity: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.

Sooner or later they all turn their backs. They all leave. That's gospel. I've been there. I've seen it. They all do.

His face had softened: as if just being a moment with her had relaxed him, allowed him to be someone different. I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.