Quotes from Colum McCann

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.

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs-- she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.

Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether. 

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.

We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.

He told me once that there was no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along --trying to wound his faith in order to test it--and I was just another stone in the way of his God.

How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.

You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven...

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.

He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book

I suppose one finally learns, after much searching, that we really only belong to ourselves.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.

C'è chi pensa che l'amore sia la fine della strada, e che se si è abbastanza fortunati da trovarlo ci si ferma lì. Altri dicono che è come un burrone nel quale si precipita. Ma chiunque abbia vissuto almeno un po' sa che muta con il passare dei giorni, e secondo l'energia che gli si dedica, lo si conserva o ci si aggrappa, oppure lo si perde, ma a volte capita che non sia nemmeno mai stato lì, sin dall'inizio.( Questo bacio vada al mondo intero)

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 really was, what it meant.

When you divide death by life you find a circle.

Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.