Quotes from Colum McCann

There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.

It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal drums of the newspapers. Europe was a crucible of bones.

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

The tightrope walk was an act of creation that seemed to stand in direct defiance to the act of destruction twenty-seven years later. About Let the Great World Spin

The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure.

death by drowning, death by snakebite ... death by memory loss, death by claymore ... death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game ... death by authority, death by isolation, death by genocide, death by Kennedy ... death by signature, death by silence ... death by performance

The overexamined life... It's not worth living.

A writer is an explorer. She knows she wants to get somewhere, but she doesn't know if the somewhere even exists yet. It is still to be created. A Galápagos of the imagination. A whole new theory of who we are. Don

It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to make sense. The squirrel scampered up a tree trunk, the sound of its nails like water in a tub.

Watching them together slipped a knife between my ribs and hit my heart exactly.

there was always hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent,as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so.

Fear makes money, and it makes laws, and it takes land, and it builds settlements, and fear likes to keep everyone silent.

Are you saying I'm a liar? --No I'm just, like, speaking.

Someone was high or brilliant or both.

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

Another day, another dolor.

Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrapy your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.

It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left.

How very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit.

If you are wise you step through the darkness only one foot at a time.

The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself.

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.

The quiet lines matter as much as the noisy ones.