Quotes from Colum McCann

If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures.

Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there, but I'll tell you anyways: once upon a time and long ago...

There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?

A brand-new thought: Transatlantic airmail. She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over, transatlantic, trans atlas, trans antic. The distance finally broken.

The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be. Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, have become it.

If your life doesn't flash in front of your eyes, old boy, does that mean you've had no life at all?

That the reason life is so strange is that we have simply no idea what is around the next corner, and it was an obvious idea but one most of us had learned to forget.

We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip, until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

Without you, she wrote in Hebrew, I am without any depth, I am on the surface here, waiting.

I could tell from Anna's face that she had already told him about dancing in Saint Petersburg and that the memory weighed on her heavily. What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely. She had told a secret and now had the sadness of wondering how much deeper she might dig in order to keep the first secret fed.

Rami often felt that there were nine or ten Israelis inside him, fighting. The conflicted one. The shamed one. The enamored one. The bereaved one. The one who marveled at the blimp's invention. The one who knew the blimp was watching. The one watching back. The one who wanted to be watched. The anarchist. The protester. The one sick and tired of all the seeing.

I guess I've always known that it's hard to be just one person. The key is in the door and it can always be opened.

Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.

One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.

She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity.

Sometimes you've got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.

There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock - perhaps I must tell it before it is forgotten or becomes like everything else, something else.

In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat's speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter's gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us?

The ticking was gone from my mind and all was quiet everywhere in the world and I held the curtain like I held the sound of the bullets going into the draft horse, his favourite, in the barn, one two three, and I stood at the window in Stevie's jacket and looked and waited and still the rain kept coming down outside one two three and I was thinking oh what a small sky for so much rain.

We do not talk about peace, we make peace.

We are being bought off by our affair with the contemporary drug of choice: ease.

The days hardened like loaves: he ate them without appetite.