Quotes from Colum McCann

As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.

For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.

It was America, after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted. But what if you were the one walking underneath? What if the tightrope walker really had fallen? It was quite possible that he could have killed not just himself, but a dozen people below. Recklessness and freedom - how did they become a cocktail?

a domino line of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, fail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage

The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don't go.

One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.

What is it about wine, Harry? —What d'ya mean? —What is it that cures us? —Made to glorify the gods. And dull the idiots.

I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.

You are a dancer for only a part of your life. The rest of the time you are walking around, thinking about it!

They say ol' man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He's the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.

One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.

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

The thing about the Occupation is that it never let you decide. It took away your ability for choice. Banish it and choice would appear.

I have nobody left to whom I can tell the story.

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.

Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

for a long time they were the same thing to me, justice and revenge.

They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who'd soon turn into empty chairs.

things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties.

And when you go around in circles, brother, the world is very big, but if you plow straight ahead it's small enough.

It will not be over until we talk

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. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.