Quotes from Colum McCann

banging saucepans to ring in the new year?

At the end of the letter he said, Fuck you, you heartless bitch, you rolled up my heart and squeezed it dry. Still, when I recalled him I would always see him waiting for me under the silver high school bleachers with a smile on his face and thirty-two perfect shining white teeth.

Rumi, the poet, the Sufi, said, something I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there.

A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.

In his book Pensées, a collection of fragments of theology and philosophy, the seventeenth-century French philosopher Pascal suggested that all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit, alone, in one room.

It was, he knew, their isolation that had made them so vocal. They thrived in the grandeur of their rage. Yet, underneath their masks they were riddled with self doubt. He could sense the fear behind the clenched jaw.

The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away, like an ancient word stepping off a page.

She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours.

We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can't stop the lines in time, so I'm a novelist.

it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come.

Yom Kippur. For Jews this is the day when we ask forgiveness for our sins, the holiest day of our calendar.

If you start forgetting you're already lost.

He glanced up in my direction and I froze. Quickly I turned away. There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.

The perfection is not so much in the performance as in the journey towards it. This is the joy. You must burn!

Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.

The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies.

As I have always said, it's a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can't be.

It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.

the hope that war will end is not chimerical. What was needed was to establish, by common consent, a central authority that would have the last word in every conflict of interest. Beyond that, anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevitably counteracts war. What had to be sought was a community of feeling, and a mythology of the instincts.

I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come.

Rami said to the audience that all walls were destined to fall, no matter what. He was not so naive, 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.

There's nothing so absurd that you can't find at least one person to buy it.

The soldiers called the bullets Lazarus pills: when possible, they could be picked up and used again.