Quotes from Colum McCann

Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.

There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance.

The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no

Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there. -Rumi

Goodness is more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love.

The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap.

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lifted miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day umtouched, some old, lost sweet tasting time.

The watchers below pulled their breath in all at once. The air suddenly felt shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.

She had told Jaslyn once that everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth. The person we know at first, [she thinks] is not the one we know at last.

A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines.

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

There was something in the music of the accent that Douglass liked: it was as if the Cork people put long lazy hammocks in their sentences.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

Literature can remind us that not all ife is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.

They entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger.

The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.

Rami, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I'll meet you there." We were right and we were wrong and we met in a field. We realized that we wanted to kill each other to achieve the same thing, peace and security. Imagine that, what an irony, it's crazy.

It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.

Gloria laughed at them and said that she'd overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.

All the lives we could live, all the people we would never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.