Quotes from Colum McCann

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.

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 repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.

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

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.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

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

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday...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.

There are no days more full than those we go back to.

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

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.

And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.

I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.